Wendy Cope Arts and Reviews editor for the Inner London Education Authority magazine, "Contact". Five years later she became a freelance writer and was a television critic for "The Spectator" magazine until 1990. Five collections of her adult poetry have been published, "Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis" in 1986, "Serious Concerns" in 1992, "If I Don't Know" in 2001, "Family Values" in 2011, and "Anecdotal Evidence" in 2018. She has also edited several anthologies of comic verse and was a judge of the 2007 Man Booker Prize. In 1998, she was voted the listeners' choice in a BBC Radio 4 poll to
Kay Ryan Wendy Cope, and Amy Clampitt have been noted by some critics. Thus Katha Pollitt wrote that Ryan's fourth collection, "Elephant Rocks" (1997), is "Stevie Smith rewritten by William Blake" but that "Say Uncle" (2000) "is like a poetical offspring of George Herbert and the British comic poet Wendy Cope." Another reviewer of "Say Uncle" (2000) wrote of Ryan, "Her casual manner and nods to the wisdom tradition might endear her to fans of A. R. Ammons or link her distantly to Emily Dickinson. But her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of