Carcanet published Jeffrey Wainwright's first book of poems, Heart's Desire, in 1978, and his highly-praised Selected Poems in 1985.
The title poem of this new collection states:


The red-headed pupil is worried
he is not following.

But there's a lot to follow. What is his body, what is his mind? How can he be him? What is real, and can he look for it? Is he only a different version of a brick wall? Studiously, peering closer, as though at an anatomy lesson, `he tries harder'.

Now there is this idea of mattering, even as against Empires. And of Freedom. Being free of thirst, hunger, disease, could he be free of everything-of love, of belief, of the dead? And how can he talk of these things? How can all these bits of history, dreams, quotations, family, different voices as well as what he tries to think of for himself, fit together? Two ambitious, twenty-four part sequences comprise The Red-Headed Pupil. Both display broad political and human perspectives and a remarkable prosody. More than fifteen years on, readers will recognise the poet of the celebrated `Thomas Muntzer' sequence with the technical and civic resources of an eloquent maturity.