What Must Happen

What Must Happen has concerns which might be grouped under three headings. First there are personal, mainly elegiac poems that recall parents, relations and friends. The second grouping, including the title poem, has poems on wider historical subjects some of which relate to the personal through my recollections of my upbringing and the history of the Potteries. This group also includes a series of contemporary characterisations of some of the Roman gods. Thirdly the collection includes some extensive sequences best described as ?variations’ in that they reiterate and vary particular words, phrases, images and most importantly rhythms. One, ?An Empty Street’ takes off from a painting, ?Via San Leonardo’ by the 20th century Italian painter Ottone Rosai. The poems mostly use a free verse line although there is frequent use of stanza groupings and symmetrical structures across the poems as a whole. Whilst the personal and the historical poems often make use of considerable research, the composition of the ?variations’ has been looser and more intuitive.

Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1944 and was educated locally and at the University of Leeds. He has taught at the University of Wales, Long Island University in Brooklyn and for many years at the Manchester Metropolitan University where he was Professor in the Department of English and its Writing School until 2008. His first poetry collection was published by Northern House in 1971 and first full book, Heart’s Desire, by Carcanet in 1978. Carcanet Press also publish his Selected Poems (1985), The Red-Headed Pupil (1994), Out of the Air (1999) and Clarity or Death! (2008). He has translated plays by Peguy, Claudel and Corneille for BBC Radio 3 and his version of Bernard-Marie Koltes’ In the Silence of Cotton Fields was broadcast in March 1999. The play has subsequently been performed by the Actors Touring Company and published by Methuen. Jeffrey Wainwright has published widely on poetry, including Poetry: The Basics (Routledge 2004) and his book on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, Acceptable Words (Manchester University Press, 2005).