If I Don't Know

Wendy Cope''s most recent collection, her first since Serious Concerns in 1992, extends her concern with the comedy of the examined life (''the way we have been, the way we sometimes are''), and imagines those adjustments to the ordinary which would fulfil our futures, or allow us to realize the golden age of five minutes ago, or weigh the ''out there'' of the present moment, where what is in sigh...