Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid’s poetry is published by Faber. Katerina Brac is out in paperback.

Two Poems

Christopher Reid, 18 March 1982

Kawai’s Trilby

Cold comforts of a hotel room: the air-conditioning and fridge join forces for a chummy hum, barbershop-style. Poised on the edge of bed, I think how far I’ve come.

Two weeks ago we kissed goodbye. Now in a towerblock hotel in a strange land, I inventory the trappings of my pilgrim cell: bath, holy scriptures, a TV.

Outside my window, a huge sign flushes, then...

Pioneers

Christopher Reid, 3 September 1981

‘It is strange,’ Charles Tomlinson writes, ‘to have met the innovators of one’s time only when age had overtaken them.’ The innovators to whom he refers are those American poets – Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams and others – whose work and moral example have been of importance to his own growth as a writer.

Poem: ‘Cambridgeport Christmas’

Christopher Reid, 3 September 1981

Ice aches and eases underfoot: a luscious pleasure for the solitary walker, where morning flings its shadows,

extravagant and pat, across playground and parking-lot. Cars are stunned by a Yuletide smother-love. Bushes weigh

their meted dollops, and the boxy clapboard churches are drenched and cleansed by a piquant light from the east. One for every block,

they favour a dapper domestic...

A Match for Macchu Picchu

Christopher Reid, 4 June 1981

John Felstiner’s Translating Neruda: The Way to Macchu Picchu is an unusual, honest and enterprising book, but ultimately something of a disappointment. Its title suggests a book-lover’s pilgrimage, an intellectual adventure of the order of, say, The Quest for Corvo or The Road to Xanadu. A great deal of the pleasure it offers derives from the openness – rare in the academic field, where positions tend to be held with entrenched fervour – that the author permits in telling of his unique journey. Having said this, I have to declare that it is this very scrupulousness which makes Felstiner’s achievement at best a minor or compromised one.

Cage’s Cage

Christopher Reid, 7 August 1980

The writings and reported sayings of famous composers have a strange, but respectable, literary status. Their musical status is, of course, more doubtful, even where a great composer is concerned. The Stravinsky/Robert Craft dialogues provide a case in point: can these unlikely confections, stilted essays in what one might call the comedy of conversational manners, really be taken seriously? In a sense, yes, they can. Their rhetoric – an arch, Nabokovian, dictionary English, a formality about as ‘lifelike’ as the frigid give-and-take we find in Compton-Burnett, or in Valéry’s Dialogues – does have its persuasive power. For the while at any rate, we are transported to a pastoral domain where reminiscence, opinion, gossip and verbal playfulness are indulged for all they are worth.

Wobbly, I am: Famous Seamus

John Kerrigan, 25 April 2024

As Seamus Heaney’s fame grew, and ‘the N-word’ (Nobel) added lustre, he attracted intrusive commentary. There were ‘feminist uppercuts’ and ‘Marxist flesh wounds’ from the academics. The...

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Between leaving school and going to Cambridge, Ted Hughes did his National Service in the RAF. Writing from RAF West Kirby, in the Wirral, to a friend, Edna Wholey, in 1949 –...

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Ringmaster

John Redmond, 28 November 1996

Born at the end of the Seventies and in decline at the beginning of the Eighties, Martianism, as a movement in British poetry, was shortlived, and as a descriptive term, misleading. Largely the...

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Christ’s Teeth

C.K. Stead, 10 October 1991

‘Dates, dates are of the essence; and it will be found that I date quite exactly the breakdown of the imaginative exploit of the Cantos: between the completion of the late sequence called...

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Dialect does it

Blake Morrison, 5 December 1985

Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish)...

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Decorations and Contingencies

John Bayley, 16 September 1982

Decoration in poetry traditionally has a purpose: to embellish the story of the Faerie Queene or of Venus and Adonis, to ornament with appropriate curlicues the exposition of order and harmony in...

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A Martian School of two or more

James Fenton, 6 December 1979

Craig Raine’s second collection follows swiftly upon his first, The Onion, Memory (1978). It is as if the poet had been waiting impatiently over us, while we picked ourselves up off the...

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