The Curiosities

by Christopher Reid

The Curiosities is the eleventh book of poems from this most inventive and celebrated of British poets. Clustering around the letter 'C', the seventy-some poems that comprise this collection celebrate a lexicon of lived experience through a single letter of the alphabet. Here we find tales of cufflinks and costume, cougars and cochineal, catapults and cavalry, even canoodlings in canoes. With a characteristic sleight of hand, Christopher Reid shifts deftly between seriousness and play, elegy and anarchy in this sometimes-zany, sometimes-haunting compendium of bright-eyed verses. Here and there the story-telling roams and sweeps: here are tales 'for' friends and loved ones, there are tales 'after' the great poets of history. But whoever and whatever the mode of address, these poems are frequently underpinned by a unifying humanity. The Curiosities is a temptatious read, full of wisdom and surprise, humour and lament, and is a poignant and convincing reminder that in a world where 'nobody's allowed to live forever', life is for celebrating, and grasping by the collar.

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2015

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

[Miknat]

Not one of his best collections, imho. The writing is still beautiful and funny and words are perfectly poised and placed, but the content -- too much of the same, I thought, all these poems running along a theme (a rather crude theme). That said, the high points are still impossibly high.

[Edgar Trevizo]

Not at all as good as his long poems. The title is very eloquent: these pieces are just curiosities.

[Christoph John]

Christopher Reid was Faber and Faber’s poetry editor and his work with Ted Hughes was well regarded, as are many of his own works [he’s won the Costa Prize, for instance]. I am not familiar with his oeuvre although I had read one of the verses in this collection before without realising who the author was.

Based around the letter ‘C’, The Curiosities is at times an interesting and off-beat look at seventy-odd unrelated subjects, mostly concerned with generalisations on sex and looking back. Reid tries to gee up our memories of school days and adolescence, but there is something missing in the overall telling. At times the poems are sensual, stimulating and sexual, other times intellectually provocative; mostly they are written for laughs. If a point is being made by the poet, it’s not to take the title subject too seriously. Often Reid injects a slightly sleazy, unpleasant tone because the descriptions are plain and lacking imagery or metaphor. They are almost too obtuse. This may be the intention, but when poems such as The Colt, with its short sumptuous descriptions of horses, can be sensually and emotionally satisfying, or The Coin reveals a fear of death and dying through Greek myth , you do wonder where all the phrasing grace and descriptive disguise has vanished to. Maybe this is what people want from their modern poets. Not sure. Jury’s out for me.

[Russio]

I knew nothing about Christopher Reid before reading this collection but as I did so I guessed him to be getting on a little, heterosexual and privately educated. Three ticks.

There are some interesting poems here, such as The Cat, The Colt, The Children, The Cheat, The Cyclists, The Confessions and The Crotchet but there are also unspectacular denouements to many poems, such as - guess what - the lovers were both male (The Circumstances). This might be an amazing development to those in a particularly hetero-orthodox mindset, bit it made me wonder why this poetic climax was considered so weighty by the writer.

There are some lovely metaphors along the way, such as a description of how it feels to set out on a lie, but I think that much of this collection is that of a man unashamedly (parading as) alpha, in a way that only a certain degree of entitlement really grants.

Of note: all the poems are entitled “The C-.” A poet’s game, I guess.

[J.]

Written with the constraint of writing poems on things all beginning with the letter C, this collection is a bricolage where sex drives the collector's tendencies. (Indeed, the heavy-handed sex theme points - obviously - to two four-letter C-words: *those* c-words, which are the ultimate themes on which his poems are the variations.) Fun, right? Except that it doesn't always work without feeling forced or gimmicky. There's also this weird "pervy old (hetero) man on the subway" meets "boys' boarding school talking about sex" meets "dry spell obsession with/fixation on sex" vibe, where the poet's humor/satiric turns toe the line with misogyny. However, when Reid is on point, he's razor sharp. Particular standouts for me: "The Calabash," "The Couch," "The Café, "The Catapult," "The Critics," "The Courtesan," and "The Caryatids."

[Natalie Sylvaine]

Did not enjoy. Having to wade through so much unpleasant and crass content, was not worth the odd line it poem that was good. Women, to him, seem entirely reduced to their bodies. Sleezy old man poems.

[Clara]

Entertaining and wide ranging poems

[James (The Serial Reader)]

3.5 stars rounded down. Not Reid's finest work.

[Raytown]

Sadly for me, I found most of these to be pretentious duds.

[Mugren Ohaly]

Each poem was written to suit its title