If I Don't Know Wendy Cope Faber and Faber, 74pp, £8.99 ISBN 0571207677

Halfway through this book, there is a "Poem on the Theme of Humour" in the form of an epistolary rebuke to the organisers of the 1994 Bard of the Year competition, who had ruled that entries may be "in any style and on any theme (except humour)". "What a good idea to have a separate competition/Called 'Fun 94', with smaller prizes/For those who write humorous poems!/It doesn't dilute your message to the reading public/Real poetry is no fun at all."

It makes a serious argument, one that deserves to be made. How much better, though, had Wendy Cope exemplified it in the poem, which as it stands seems barely a poem at all. Or perhaps that was the point. Anyway, before I go on, I suppose I should own up to my long-standing and vigorous anti-Cope prejudice. To me, the very title of her first collection, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis, was in itself a mortal sin against taste, inexpiable and unremissable. Even now, when I see her name above a poem in a magazine, I avert my eyes and pass speedily by. But having read this book, I must admit that my prejudice was - as they say of an Albanian asylum-seeker's claim - probably ill-founded.

Yet, as the above example might indicate, this is a patchy book. Cope is undoubtedly at her best in formal poems; it's where she seems most at home. This volume, for instance, contains a small selection of superb villanelles. The form lends itself readily to light comedy (though Dylan Thomas used it to great and sombre effect), but to pull it off as confidently as Cope does is no easy trick. "A Reading", which captures beautifully the perceptual disjunction between poet and audience, is a far more potent corrective to self-aggrandising, dry-as-dust verse than is the loose and unstructured "Poem on the Theme of Humour".

Elsewhere, there are some adept, well-rhymed verses about Vanessa Bell, lost socks and dead sheep. But then, at the end of the book, we find a soppy, sloppy 20-page narrative called "The Teacher's Tale" (Cope taught in a London primary school for many years), in which a bright child with an overbearing mother is saved from a life of crime by the love and support of . . . er, his London primary school teacher. It's not funny and it's not clever. In fact, it's ghastly. W H Auden did this sort of thing many years ago, with a great deal more wit and verve.

But that's the trouble with humour: the reader either buys into it or does not. It can be argued that comic verse takes chances its "serious" cousin shuns, but it is always a high-risk strategy - as with Tory campaigning on the euro, if you lose that stake there is nothing else to play for. And too often here, Cope simply loses her shirt: I quickly part company with a poem that starts "My love got in the car/And sat on my banana". But then again, there's one about traditional breeds of prize pig that had me laughing out loud ("If you want to go away/On a summer holiday/And take your pig, make no mistake/A Tamworth Red's the pig to take"). And in between, there are several more gently lyrical efforts (including some decent versions of Marina Tsvetayeva), which hit and miss in equal measure. But what Cope is known and, more importantly, bought for is her finely honed, witty stuff, so it seems odd that the publisher's blurb should puff up the development of this "softer, lyrical voice", when it really cannot compare with the core product. Funny business, poetry.

Adam Newey is the New Statesman's poetry critic

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