Her new book is a highlight of this year in poetry and her work very much the sort of thing that finds favour in this modest backwater of the literary world.
Her first book, The Shuttered Eye, isn't represented in this selection. It was a fine debut but not many writers have produced much that is going to be regarded as their best work by the tender age of 26. I think the poems become 'tighter', more accomplished and more convincing in the second book, In Defence of Adultery, and without having chosen an outright number one among her poems just yet, I'll begin with the title poem of that.
With none of the vainglorious striving for effect or showy cleverness that betrays too much poetry, it is understated in its building of instances of how infatuation feels until undermining the more difficult situation of adultery with the admission that,
Sometimes we manage
to convince ourselves of that.
She's good at that and does a similar thing, observing the nuances of romantic attachment, in A Short History of Desire, in which the fashions change through the ages but the meaning remains the same. It's good on rhythm and its own internal music. There's something Lumsdonian one can sense in poems like this- not a conscious borrowing, I'm sure, but a kinship that represents one of the ways that good poems are being written in English in the current moment. It is a comparison one can take further in Moderate Restaurant Clatter, the second loudest of four poems under the title Playing it by Ear that have designated decibel levels. The last seven lines are on the same rhyme. The expert handling of syntax and rhythm (as often in Copus poems) make it a pleasure to read more than once. It's hard to say how much such things occur naturally or how hard it has been worked for but once it happens, it repays indefinitely.
I have only just mentioned the new volume, The World's Two Smallest Humans, below, and my opinion of the best poems in it haven't changed a great deal over the last few days. Stars Moving Westwards in a Winter Garden is likely to become a long-term favourite, quietly moving and moving quietly towards its achievement of considering the passing of time and of everything. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. More than just 'mundi', really.
There are candidates to challenge Miss Jenkins for her place in this list, that form that Julia Copus seems to be the very best at, but we will stick with the rule that only six items can be mentioned in a Top 6 and not use it as an excuse to include more.
Ghost completes the half dozen for its last lines, mainly, admittedly.
There's every chance that the next three books of poems will add enough great poems to make an update of this selection a much more difficult job in several years' time but it will be a job to look forward to. Julia Copus is exactly the poet that is required at the moment and if she wasn't there we wouldn't know what we were missing.
