Reasoner

Wainwright Jeffrey

In a series of ninety-five poems we listen to "the Reasoner", a voice that is by turns ardent, despairing and comic. Petty obsessions rub against attempts at philosophical seriousness; vernacular expression vies with an intent deliberation. Above all, the Reasoner is worried. He has cherished the notion that, with thought and study, the world may be understood. But the world remains recalcitrant, elusive even in simple things like the trickeries of light on a spider's web. Language plays tricks, although it may be as complete as we can manage. History proposes and disposes of its patterns. Behind all this there may be a "hidden order" – and that is both a hope and a fear.

Does God help us to understand any of this? Does Art? Is the "soul" a sanctuary? The Reasoner, the reader, "smiles ruefully and soldiers on", "for this is not a wicked but a hard world, / and people struggle, without a scheme of things, / and deserve release".

About the Author

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).

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