Barefoot: The Collected Poems of Alastair Reid

by Alastair Reid, Tom Pow (Editor)

Born in the small community of Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, Alastair Reid (1926-2014) became one of the most international figures in post-war Scottish literature. A staff writer on The New Yorker for many years, he was widely admired as an essayist and as a translator of Latin American writers, including Neruda and Borges. He also spent time in Mallorca working with Robert Graves in the 1950's. This is the first ever collected poems of a man Jay Parini described as “among the finest poets of his generation, it's time his work found the audience it deserves”.

Genres: Poetry

256 pages, Paperback

Published February 28, 2019

About the author

Alastair Reid was a Scottish poet, translator, essayist, and scholar of Latin American literature. He joined the staff of The New Yorker in 1959 and translated works by Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges. Although he was known for translations, his own poems gained notice during his lifetime. He had lived in Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Morocco, Argentina, Mexico, Chile, the Dominican Republic, and in the United States.

Among his many books for children are A Balloon for a Blunderbuss, I Keep Changing, and Millionaires (all illustrated by Bob Gill), and Supposing (illustrated by Abe Birnbaum). In 2008 he published two career-spanning collections of work, Inside Out: Selected Poetry and Translations and Outside In: Selected Prose.

Reviews

[Jee Koh · Rating 2 out of 5]

Barefoot is the Collected Poems of Scottish poet Alastair Reid edited by Tom Pow. I found the book in Barnes & Nobles one evening while browsing the poetry section. The poems are skillful and reflective, sincere and nostalgic, but not terribly memorable, to be honest. The stakes in the poems are not raised very high.