Red-Headed Pupil
And Other Poems
But there's a lot to follow. What is his body, what is his mind? How can he be him? What is real, and can he look for it? Is he only a different version of a brick wall? Studiously, peering closer, as though at an anatomy lesson, "he tries harder".
Now there is this idea of mattering, even as against Empires. And of Freedom. Being free of thirst, hunger, disease, could he be free of everything-of love, of belief, of the dead? And how can he talk of these things? How can all these bits of history, dreams, quotations, family, different voices as well as what he tries to think of for himself, fit together? Two ambitious, twenty-four part sequences comprise "The Red-Headed Pupil". Both display broad political and human perspectives and a remarkable prosody. More than fifteen years on, readers will recognise the poet of the celebrated "Thomas Muntzer" sequence with the technical and civic resources of an eloquent maturity.
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).
