On Tuesday 2nd February we’ll be gathering at Blackwell’s to look at Christopher Reid’s Costa Prize-winning collection, A Scattering. Some of you may already have discovered that the prize came as a surprise to his publishers, Arete – the book is currently reprinting and copies are very hard to get hold of. Blackwell’s may or may not have them by Monday 1st. However, we will have printed copies of the poems we’ll be looking at to give you a taste of the book’s delights – the lightest of touches to four sequences charting the course of the poet’s wife’s brain tumour and death. It is a celebration of their 30 years together, her creative energy and his love and devotion. A heartening read despite the sadness, skilful in technique and transformative in its focus.
The title poem shows much of the book’s strengths.
A Scattering
I expect you’ve seen the footage: elephants,
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
decide to do something about it.
But what, exactly? They can’t, of course,
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can’t even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them
this way and that way. So they do.
And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura.
Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations –
may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.
Looking forward to seeing you 6.15pm-8pm.
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