About Stanley
“…he produced a remarkable body of work that should give him a place in the Yorkshire Poetic Hall of Fame somewhere between Ted Hughes and Simon Armitage, between the nature poet and the sharp observer of human frailty and majesty.” Ian McMillan
Stanley Cook was born in 1922 in Austerfield, South Yorkshire. He won a scholarship and studied at the University of Oxford.
He worked as a teacher and lecturer in English at Huddersfield Polytechnic.
He was married to Kathleen and had three children: Sarah, Paul and Ann.
He died in 1991.
His work and achievements
He won the poetry competition at the Sheffield Arts Festival in 1965, and the Cheltenham Festival/
Sunday Telegraph ‘Poem For Our Time’ Poetry Prize in 1972.
He edited the Poetry Nottingham magazine for several years.
“As far as style is concerned, I hope the steelworker and his wife next door would never need a dictionary to read my poems. I like to feel, too, that I have been as practical and unsentimental with a poem as if I had farmed, smithed or carpentered it—that the rest of the family would think I had done some “real work” and had not let them down.” Stanley Cook, introduction to Form Photograph
His poems were broadcast on the BBC in Poetry Extra and his children’s poems were included in many anthologies.
Memories of Stanley
An interview with poet, Peter Sansom
In the beginning, who really helped you to become that poet?
Well, in my generation, there were ‘the Liverpool poets’, and a bestselling book of 3 poets: Brian Hatton, Adrien Henry, and Roger McGuff. They wrote about working class things, and they did it in a really down-to-earth, non-academic way. I think that got a lot of people into poetry. And then there were the people like Ted Hughes knocking about that you felt, “oh yeah, it’s OK if you do this.” But most was when I went to college.
I went to the dreaming spires of Huddersfield polytechnic and there was a poet there called Stanley Cook – quite a brilliant man. His poetry is full of real detail, stuff from everyday life. It’s quite wonderful. He wrote to me – I was one of his students, and he was editor of a magazine called Poetry Nottingham. I was Nottingham Poet number 1! As in, my pamphlet was the first one he chose and published. That was what did it really, Stanley Cook!