Read and contextualised by the poet herself, these gentle gems have an extra tang of immediacyA greatest hits collection from one of Britain’s best-loved poets, Wendy Cope’s The Orange contains themes of love, friendship, family and mortality. The 1992 title poem – which recently enjoyed a second life on TikTok, with users showing off their fruit-based tattoos – finds the author buying a large orange, sharing it with two friends and concluding: “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” After the Lunch is about falling in love on Waterloo Bridge while “high on the charm and the drink”, while Being Boring hails the virtues of a drama-free life (“No news is good news, and long may it last”).Cope is the reader, her delivery gently understated and frequently deadpan. In Loss, she reflects on the end of a relationship in which the woman “went through hell. His absence wasn’t a problem, but the corkscrew had gone as well.” Sometimes she breaks from the narration to share the context of a poem. She describes attending a conference in America where one evening she found herself the only woman at a table of men, inspiring the poem Men Talking: “If you’re with several blokes, it’s anecdotes and jokes. If you were to die / Of boredom, there and then / They’d notice by and by, if you were to die. // But it could take a while.” Continue reading...