Christopher Reid’s poetry is published by Faber. Katerina Brac is out in paperback.
RELATED ARTICLES
21 February 1980
Facts and Makings
24 January 1980
Ante Antietam
6 January 2000
On club culture
6 December 1979
Cartoon Quality
20 November 2008
Harold Wilson and Vietnam
4 August 1994
The South
11 March 1993
The Numinous Moose
RELATED CATEGORIES
Literature and literary criticism, Poetry, Americas, North America, USA, Europe, Western Europe, UK, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1960-1969, 1900-1999, 1946-1999, 1970-1979
Vol. 2 No. 1 · 24 January 1980
pages 22-23 | 2142 words
Excellent Enigmas
Christopher Reid
- Lies and Secrets by John Fuller
Secker, 70 pp, £3.50, October 1980, ISBN 0 436 16753 0
- Crossing by John Matthias
Anvil, 125 pp, £3.25, October 1980, ISBN 0 85646 035 4
- Growing Up by Michael Horovitz
Allison and Busby, 96 pp, £4.95, October 1980, ISBN 0 85031 232 9
- Report to the Working Party. Asylum. Otiose [preceded by] After by Anthony Barnett
Nothing Doing, 121 pp, £4.80, August 1980, ISBN 0 901494 17 8
Doubts, prevarications, velleities, different kinds of inability to act: these are the overt themes of many of the poems in John Fuller’s inventive new volume. The title, Lies and Secrets, does not belong to any one poem, but is a warning that no statement found in the book should be relied on either for straightforwardness or for a disclosure of the whole truth. Stories are narrated by characters who may be cagey, volatile, fanciful, captious, even self-deceiving. In the past, John Fuller has been a cunning contriver of riddles on a small scale, but here the design is grander. The verse is protean and the reader, like Neoptolemos, must grapple with fickle forms until the plain truth stands revealed.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 2 No. 3 · 21 February 1980
From Michael Horovitz
SIR: Christopher Reid reports (LRB, Vol. 2, No 1) that my ‘drawings are very much School of Stevie Smith, but even worse than hers’. This profoundly patronising pseudo-comment presumably derives from Mr Reid’s poetry having recently been assigned to the payroll of the London Literary Mafia’s education committee as ‘School of Craig Raine, but even craftier’… It’s something of a relief that an alumnus of this ordure fails to admire me or my retrospective book, especially when – as he points out – the schools of real thought represented by such greenhorns as Ginsberg, Beckett and Kathleen Raine apparently do. Meanwhile, for the benefit of those of your readers who might wish to form their own impressions, but could not easily afford the hardback edition Reid pretended to review, the Growing Up collection is also available in paperback at £2.50 (ISBN 0 850 233 7).
Michael Horovitz
Bisley, Gloucestershire
