Search results for ""Christopher Reid""

The new collection of poems from Christopher Reid.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

I've rounded up a rowdy assemblyOf my own Consequential DogsAs counterparts to Eliot's mogs.Mine are a rough and ready bunch:You wouldn't take them out to lunch . . .But if they strike you as friendly, funny,Full of bounce and fond of a romp,Forgetful of poetic pomp,I trust you'll take them as you find themAnd, at the very least, not mind them.T. S. Eliot's best-selling collection of practical cat poems has been one of the most successful poetry collections ever. At last, in the 80th year of Old Possum's Cats, we have the companion volume that Eliot had envisaged, written by master poet and Costa-winner, Christopher Reid.This wonderfully witty and varied collection, illustrated in full-colour by the brilliant Sara Ogilvie, is perfect for younger readers to appreciate. A book that will be enjoyed by generations to come, perfect for reading together!

Read more less

The acclaimed poet Christopher Reid distils Charles Boyle's six books of poems into The Disguise: Poems 1977-2001, recovering a notable one-time poet, now known as a publisher and writer of fiction and non-fiction, from poetic neglect. Charles Boyle established a reputation as a sharp, wry, disabused observer of social mores. Paleface, published by Faber, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize, and The Age of Cardboard and String, also from Faber, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Whitbread Award. But in 2001 the well ran dry. Since the first year of the twenty-first century he has not put poetic pen to paper even once. The poems remain vital and fascinating, but they have about them also a kind of archaic cast: here we find the quintessential white male Englishness from the late twentieth century on display as if in a museum. Here too is the excitement of abroad (North Africa especially), and there are ghosts, absences, exile and evasions: in hindsight, these poems offer clues to their own disappearance after thirty notable years spent partly in the sun.

Read more less

Lunch in Soho with a former lover - but Zanzotti's is under new management, and as the wine takes effect fond memories give way to something closer to the bone . . .Christopher Reid's poem, which since its first publication has been filmed by the BBC and presented on stage in numerous venues, follows the lunchtime reunion of two long-separated lovers. Every smallest detail is cherished, as step by step the narrative moves towards its tragicomic outcome.

Read more less

Christopher Reid's new collection is a quartet of works for voice, opening with the brisk and brightly coloured monologue of Professor Winterthorn - recently widowed, soon to be retired, who decides on impulse to attend a conference (on 'Nonsense and the Pursuit of Futility as strategies...') in California. He is a mordant observer, alert to the anomie of modern displacement - taxis, lifts, airports, lounges, hotel rooms - whose thin air seems at one with the loose change of widowhood, the having nowhere really to go. But adventure lies ahead, and sunshine, and Winterthorn is debonair if undeceived about the deceptions of grief. His strange ride ends on a note of recovery, with the world suddenly in focus again and brimming before him.

Read more less

The poems in this collection are presented as translations from the work of the eponymous Katerina Brac, who lives in a country, and writes in a language, that are never identified.'Reid's achievement in this book is to conjure up in very few words a life-system capable of supporting real poetry. He has never written more carefully and delicately.' Peter Porter, Observer'Sensitive, intelligent and highly inventive.' Stephen Spender

Read more less

It follows the exploits of a group of hapless bards, more intimately connected than they themselves can possibly know, in their attempts to navigate the hazards of London literary society. Reid's colourful cast includes an ageing ex-offender, a lecherous academic, a fading grande dame and her underachieving best friend, and two young graduates, one as feckless as the other is ambitious. Hard as each may try, the poets' attempts at literary and social advancement are continually hampered both by fate and by a variety of personal shortcomings, ensuring that their story accelerates irrevocably towards comic catastrophe and collapse. Six Bad Poets is a delicious romp through a world that the author has observed closely over many years, and from which he reports with merciless accuracy, zest and humour.

Read more less

In Christopher Reid's marvellous new collection, a schoolboy furtively and thrillingly drops a marble through the top of his desk so that it makes its way in darkness along a complicated chute of books, rulers and rubbish, only to emerge from a hole in the base and be caught deftly in his other hand. The poem is titled 'Homeric' and might serve as a clue to the mood and construction of the collection in general, where the poet, now in his seventies, seeks to track down and commune with his much younger self. It is an investigation that tests Wordsworth's 'the Child is father of the Man' by contriving a series of transtemporal encounters between two selves who may now, conceivably, begin to understand each other.Reid was born in Hong Kong and, thanks to the roving nature of his father's employment, spent some of his childhood in foreign places. Most of the locations in this book, however, are the Britain of the 1950s and '60s - perhaps, at this distance in time, no less exotic. As the poems move from pre-verbal experience to adolescence, the younger self is captured in scenes that illuminate the steps by which a man - a poet - has been raised. Another poem conjures up the childhood of Henry James in order to reflect on 'the large part / mystery plays in both childhood and art', a proposition that the book as a whole may be said to endorse through both its wondering gaze and its ingenuity.

Read more less

This edition brings together A Scattering and Anniversary into a single book of lamentation and remembrance, its subject being Christopher Reid's wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, who died of cancer at the age of fifty-five. A Scattering was first published in the UK in 2009 to wide acclaim, winning the Costa Book of the Year Award. This moving and fiercely self-reflective collection is divided into four poetic sequences. The first was written during a holiday a few months before Gane's death with the knowledge that the end was approaching; the second recalls her last courageous weeks, spent in a hospice in London; the third continues the exploration of bereavement from a variety of perspectives; and the fourth addresses her directly, celebrating her life, personality and achievements.Pairing A Scattering for the first time with Anniversary, which was written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Gane's death, this volume brings Reid into dialogue, again, with the wife he loved. A moving exploration of the stages of grief and how the 'weighty emptinesses' that remain after bereavement change us, A Scattering andAnniversary show us what it means to love, lose and - forever changed - continue on.

Read more less

Poems of London brings together a remarkably wide range of poems inspired by the storied city, from its teeming medieval streets to the multicultural metropolis it is today.The pantheon of classic English poets, from Shakespeare and Donne to Wordsworth and Blake to T. S. Eliot and Ted Hughes, provide their views of London alongside tributes by notable visitors including Arthur Rimbaud, Samuel Beckett, and Sylvia Plath. Here, too, are poetic contributions by an array of immigrants and the children of immigrants, including Linton Kwesi Johnson, Fleur Adcock, Patience Agbabi, and Booker Prize-winner Bernardine Evaristo. All the famous sights of London, from the Thames to the Tower, are touched on in this vibrant collection, and denizens of its busy streets, ranging from princes to pub-goers to pickpockets, wander through these pages. The result is an enthralling portrait of an endlessly varied and fascinating place.

Read more less

The Late Sun asserts a balance between memorialisation of the recently dead and celebration of the vitality of the living. Early in the collection is a set of poems about the poet's mother, who died in great age after a life of exotic travel, and the poet's own travels, his sense of both place and displacement, are vibrantly explored in other pieces. The city where he lives - particularly, and somewhat unusually, in a sequence titled 'Smells of London' - provides many of the themes, but the civic glades and sparkling vistas of the Mediterranean are just as important, and the book adds up to an affirmation of international perspectives at a time when civilised values are increasingly threatened.

Read more less

For and After is Christopher Reid's fourth collection of poems to be published by Faber & Faber, and his first since Expanded Universes in 1996. It consists, more or less half and half, of poems bearing dedications to friends, colleagues and loved ones, and translations or versions of works in foreign languages, including a passage from The Odyssey and a miscellany of pieces by Horace, Leopardi, Baudelaire, Rilke and others. By turns intimate and affectionate, satirical and mischievous, For and After is a dazzling insight into one of the most imaginative minds in the business.

Read more less

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter-writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives (including a readership comprising both adults and children); a life pared down to essentials and yet eventful, peripatetic, at times publicly controversial.

Read more less

I've rounded up a rowdy assemblyOf my own Consequential DogsAs counterparts to Eliot's mogs.Mine are a rough and ready bunch:You wouldn't take them out to lunch . . .But if they strike you as friendly, funny,Full of bounce and fond of a romp,Forgetful of poetic pomp,I trust you'll take them as you find themAnd, at the very least, not mind them.T. S. Eliot's best-selling collection of practical cat poems has been one of the most successful poetry collections in the world.For the first time in company history a companion volume will be published. Originally conceived by Eliot himself, Old Toffer's Book of Consequential Dog poems are a witty, varied and exquisitely compiled as Eliot's cats.

Read more less

I've rounded up a rowdy assemblyOf my own Consequential DogsAs counterparts to Eliot's mogs.Mine are a rough and ready bunch:You wouldn't take them out to lunch . . .But if they strike you as friendly, funny,Full of bounce and fond of a romp,Forgetful of poetic pomp,I trust you'll take them as you find themAnd, at the very least, not mind them.T. S. Eliot's best-selling collection of practical cat poems has been one of the most successful poetry collections in the world.For the first time in company history a companion volume will be published. Originally conceived by Eliot himself, Old Toffer's Book of Consequential Dog poems are a witty, varied and exquisitely compiled as Eliot's cats.

Read more less

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter-writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives (including a readership comprising both adults and children); a life pared down to essentials and yet eventful, peripatetic, at times publicly controversial.

Read more less

MPT’s spring issue ’Our Small Universe’ focuses on the many languages of the United Kingdom - from Romani to Welsh; Shetlandic to BSL; Turkish to Ulster Scots – and features Owen Sheers, Zoe Brigley, Liz Berry, MacGillivray, David Morley, Al-Saddiq Al-Raddi and Matthew Hollis. Cyril Jones and Philip Gross collaborate using the Welsh `englyn’ form, and Sophie Herxheimer writes in her Grandmother’s `Inklisch’. Also: an introduction to Rohingya poetry, Zeina Hashem Beck’s bilingual form, the Duet, and a new translation of Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński’s major modernist poem `A Trip to Świder’ by Renata Senktas and Christopher Reid. All this and more in the groundbreaking magazine dedicated to poetry in translation: for the best in world poetry read MPT.

Read more less

In a series of timeless and modern-day renditions, Maurice Riordan brilliantly introduces us to the poems that founded Ireland's rich literature. Memorable and accessible, these early lyrics are presented in their classic incarnations by literary giants from both sides of the Irish Sea: in examples by W. H. Auden, Flann O'Brien, Alfred Lord Tennyson, John Montague, Robert Graves and Frank O'Connor. But the anthology is much more than a survey of canonical texts; through a series of specially commissioned poems, fresh eyes are brought to bear on these ancient poems: by Seamus Heaney and Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, by Paul Muldoon and Kathleen Jamie, by Ciaran Carson and Christopher Reid, and many others. The experience is enhanced still further by the enabling hand of Riordan himself, in a sweep of exquisite translations of his own made especially for this publication. Unforgettable and inspirational, a book for giving and for keeping: The Finest Music by some of the art-form's finest players.

Read more less

An anthology of instructional poems by modern poets dispensing advice on love, seduction, relationships and heartbreak. Produced to look like an old-fashioned schoolbook, complete with diagrams, the Poetic Guide professes to help while offering a combination of stone-cold wisdom and highly dubious romantic advice.With poems from Jo Brandon, John Canfield, Jade Cuttle, Mel Denham, Amy Key, Anja Konig, Cheryl Moskowitz, Abigail Parry, Rachel Piercey, Richard O'Brien, Christopher Reid, Jacqueline Saphra and Liane Strauss.Christopher Reid's most recent book is Six Bad Poets (Faber). Among his earlier publications, A Scattering was declared Costa Book of the Year 2009, while The Song of Lunch became a BBC2 film starring Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson. Andrew Wynn Owen won The Times Stephen Spender Prize in 2011 and a Foyle Young Poets of the Year Award in 2008. Liane Strauss teaches literature and creative writing at Birkbeck College and The Poetry School. She is the author of Leaving Eden (Salt Publishing, 2010) and Frankie, Alfredo (Donut Press, 2009). Abigail Parry was recently appointed Assistant editor at The Rialto magazine.

Read more less

A neurotically funny collection that looks under the hood of adult lifeAs in life, she was a pain in the arsein death. He could hear her roaringall the way from the fifth circle,'Why the hell do you get to be in abetter circle than me, I'm wrathfulbecause of your lust -'Deploying a chorus of voices both ancient and modern to explore a world of sexual politics and singles cruises, dysfunctional families and psychoanalysis, awkward cohabitations and self-help guides for the would-be Dream Girl, this is the third collection from a unique poetic talent: observant, obsessive and wickedly witty.'The funniest book I've read in years. Maris flexes her wit and wisdom to create a litany of nervous characters in a style that's mordant, sarcastic, satiric yet often compassionate . . . a poet of risk, she is dark, deep and often laugh out loud'DALJIT NAGRA'Her dry, droll, clinically deadpan manner is all her own; but her themes - obscure hurts, implacable dissatisfactions, hardwired propensity for victimhood and suffering - reflect the experience of humanity at large'CHRISTOPHER REID

Read more less

For the second half of his long life, Christopher Logue (1926-2011) - political rebel, inventor of the poster poem, pioneer of poetry and jazz - was at work on a very different project: a rewriting of Homer's Iliad. The volumes that appeared from War Music (1981) onwards were distinct from translations, in that they set out to be a radical reimagining and reconfiguration of Homer's tale of warfare, human folly and the power of the gods, in a language and style of verse that were emphatically modern. As each instalment, from Kings to Cold Calls, was published, it became clear that this was to be Logue's masterpiece.Sadly, illness prevented him from finishing it. Enough, however, of his projected final volume, Big Men Falling a Long Way, survives in notebook drafts to give a clear sense of its shape, as well as some of its dramatic high points. These have been gathered into an appendix by Logue's friend and one-time editor, Christopher Reid. The result comes as near as possible to representing the poet's complete vision, and confirms what his admirers have long known, that Collected War Music is one of the great poems of our time.

Read more less

'A marvellous book, lovingly edited, beautifully produced. . . and brimming with literary insights, much laughter, a sprinkle of gossip and the poet's insuppressible joie de vivre, even in adversity. Buy it, read it, and keep it to hand on to your children.' John Banville, Guardian'An epistolary cornucopia. . . contains an abundance of insight and illumination, literary gossip and appraisal, playfulness and cogency, all bound up with a steadfast attention to the feelings and expectations of each correspondent.' Patricia Craig, TLS Books of the YearEvery now and again I need to get down here, to get into the Diogenes tub, as it were, or the Colmcille beehive hut, or the Mossbawn scullery. At any rate, a hedge surrounds me, the blackbird calls, the soul settles for an hour or two . . .For all his public eminence, Seamus Heaney seems never to have lost the compelling need to write personal letters. In this ample but discriminating selection from fifty years of his correspondence, we are given access as never before to the life and poetic development of a literary titan - from his early days in Belfast, through his controversial decision to settle in the Republic, to the gradual broadening of horizons that culminated in the award of a Nobel Prize and the years of international acclaim that kept him heroically busy until his death.Editor Christopher Reid draws from both public and private archives to reveal this story in the poet's own words. Generous, funny, exuberant, confiding, irreverent, empathetic and deeply thoughtful, the letters encompass decades-long relationships with friends and colleagues, as well as showing an unstinted responsiveness to passing acquaintances. Moreover, Heaney's joyous mastery of language is as evident here as it is in any of his writing for a literary readership.Listening to Heaney's voice, we find ourselves in the same room as a man whose presence, when he lived, enriched the world immeasurably, and whose legacy continues to deepen our sense of what truly matters.

Read more less