As Best We Can

As Best We Can, Jeffrey Wainwright's seventh collection, marks a change of key for the poet. After the elegiac tone of The Reasoner (2016), the poems and sequences included here settle for the poet's present world. They listen to what dreams have to tell, and (with humour underwriting their concentration) they worry at the labour and release of creative work. As always in Wainwright, history - personal and political - is alive in the present. The rendering of simple elements in 'The Window-Ledge', without commentary, is among his most lucid and radical poems. By effacing the 'I' he shares experience most fully with the reader, making and sharing a place.

Jeffrey Wainwright was born in Stoke-on-Trent and educated locally and at the University of Leeds. In 1973 he moved to Manchester Polytechnic, later Manchester Metropolitan University, from where he retired as Professor of English in 2009. In 1984 he was Judith Wilson Fellow at St John’s College Cambridge. Besides poetry he has translated Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel,Pierre Corneille and Bernard-Marie Koltes for the RSC, the BBC and the Actors’ Touring Company. His poem ‘An Empty Street’ (PN Review) was shortlisted for the 2014 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. He lives in Manchester and for part of the year in Umbria.