Selected Poems

by Christopher Reid

With his first book of poems, Arcadia (1979), Christopher Reid won both a Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. His second, Pea Soup (1982), showed him developing the line of defamiliarising metaphor that had associated him, in the public mind, with the so-called Martian School. With his third, Katerina Brac (1985), however, he surprised readers with something quite a volume purporting to consist of translations from the work of a foreign poet, whose nationality and language remained undisclosed.

Subsequent volumes have confirmed Reid's restless spirit of enquiry and invention, adding new, imaginatively oblique approaches, assumed voices and authentic translations to his repertoire. The present Selected Poems follows his career as far as A Scattering, the set of elegies for his late wife that was named Costa Book of the Year for 2009.

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2011

About the author

Christopher Reid, FRSL is a Hong Kong-born British poet, essayist, cartoonist, and writer. He has been nominated twice for the Whitbread Awards in 1996 and in 1997. A contemporary of Martin Amis, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford. He is one of the exponents of Martian poetry which employs unusual metaphors to render everyday experiences and objects unfamiliar. He has worked as poetry editor at Faber and Faber and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Hull. In January 2010 he was awarded the 2009 Costa Book Award for A Scattering, written as a tribute to his late wife, the actress Lucinda Gane. The work won in the poetry category, and overall Best Book of the Year, becoming the first poet to take the overall prize since Seamus Heaney in 1999.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I liked six poems out of this 144 page book very much. Unfortunately, that's 4.17% of its content. Reid starts out as a sort of lower-wattage Craig Raine, gets badly tangled in the middle, and then finds his way to something purer, simpler, and a lot more moving. Too many of the pieces are more puzzles than poems. I'd have preferred more from A Scattering, the series of elegies written to his late wife. 'Afterlife' in particular is superb.

[Steve Bowbrick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Humour, dazzling imagery, huge creative ambition, absence of pretence, very little of that middle class literary gubbins that poets of his generation usually don’t even know they’re deploying (you know, when a poet just casually starts poaching an artichoke or something), although there are some poems set in Reid’s house in France (poets, don’t set poems in your house in France!). Some absolute gems, though, and some totally stealable images.