It was a small but focussed group that met last night to discuss Christopher Reid’s moving collection A Scattering (Arete Publications). Everyone welcomed the opportunity to read some poems from the book that’s been in the news for winning this year’s Costa Prize. We threaded our way from the Cretan labyrinth through the growth of a soul to the novel of one person’s life in poems that troubled, impressed and touched us. Here was the essence of life and death in elegantly crafted, highly imaginative poetry, displaying a wit similar to that of the metaphysical poets in the sixteenth century.
Christopher Reid achieves that difficult thing – making a poem look easy, as if it were a spontaneous utterance: Glib analogies!/ Makeshift Rhymes! But these are well-wrought poems, making full use of end rhyme and assonance, alliteration and apostrophe to achieve their effects. Two favourite poems catch intimate moments between husband and wife – one, when he is shaving her head after chemotherapy and revelling in its lineaments, the curve of her clean scalp – ‘Virgin landscape,/ so neat and so new!’ ; and then, as he waits in bed for her to return home one night, until the shock of the realisation: Of course, I’d forgotten she’d died. But the dream continues as she rolled and settled towards him before wisp(ing) clean away.
These are poems that are hard to read but you read compulsively for the sheer pleasure of their articulation, the searing knife edge they walk between distance and total immersion in the experience of grief. There is an almost scientific detachment that allows Christopher Reid to revisit memories of his long and happy marriage to a charming and remarkable woman and the space left in the wake of her passing; also an immense courage in admitting to his bereavement’s murky labours,/ quintessential upheavals, noxious bubblings/ at the bottom of a flask, as it strives to distil pure tears.
If you weren’t able to make it to this session, do pick up a copy of A Scattering when you can and read these astonishing and important poems. While you’re in the bookshop you can also buy Carol Ann Duffy’s Selected Poems, which is our selection for March. Tuesday 2nd in Blackwell’s at 6.15pm. Looking forward to seeing you then.
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