Becoming great

Christopher Reid’s Selected Poems moves through a neat thirty-year stretch from his first collection Arcadia (1979) to his acclaimed Costa-winning volume A Scattering (2009). We travel from Reid’s early period of inventiveness to the later years of solemnity. More importantly, however, it fleshes out a career many will only know through Reid’s recent work. 
 
The early poems are an acquired taste. The reader can feel, in the words of a later poem, as if they are “in a land / whose language I do not understand / but from which I could bring back / some wisdom, some purloined knack” (‘Insofar’). Personally, I’m a sucker for its trippy, psychedelic charm. Take these firecrackers from the first two collections, Arcadia and Pea Soup (1982): “chimneys think smoke” (‘Arcadia’), a “television buzzes like a fancy tie” (‘A Whole School of Bourgeois Primitives’), “the afternoon air” is stirred “to a sky-blue cocktail / of ozone and dead fish” (‘A Holiday from Strict Reality’), “Rowboats…shrug their bafflement” and “tender crabs / tango in shallows” (‘Three Sacred Places in Japan’). The artful comparisons might not resist close interrogation, but there is a box-fresh quality to the perceptions that never fails to surprise.
 
After those stagey collections, we move to selections from Katerina Brac (1985) — styled as translations from an unknown poet as cover for Reid to prod into more existential terrain. The verbal pyrotechnics have calmed, abandoning the shock-and-awe tactics of the earlier volumes. ‘Realism’ and ‘An Angel’ are particularly intriguing here, both cagey and cautious yet filled with a personality of sorts that streamlines the poems into a more pleasing formal shape. However, all that postmodern slipperiness frustrates any attempt at definitiveness; there is a lingering suspicion that “too clear a sense destroys / literature’s mysteries” (‘Smoking and Drinking’).
 
Indeed, there is always the unresolved issue in Reid’s poetry that “something in the air” continues “to dangle and vex us” (‘Feathers’). The four collections following Katerina Brac – In the Echoey Tunnel (1991), Expanded Universes (1996), For and After (2003) and Mr Mouth (2006) – all highlight the dubiousness of language: whether as “all this scribble” and “all this babble” (‘The Myth of the Mouth’), the poet “falling under the spell of the alphabet” (‘One for the Footnotes’), or the phonetic experimentation of the longer poem ‘Memres of Alfred Stoker’. In Reid’s hands, language emerges not as something through which to see but as a medium that dictates the seeing: goggles rather than clear glass.
 
The danger with such an approach is that the poetry can become anemic. The most poetically accomplished part of the Selected Poems is undoubtedly that taken from A Scattering. In ‘The Unfinished’, Reid finally balances his verbal bravura with equivalent emotional vigour. Charting the death of his wife, the elegies included here are achingly moving. From the taut yet tragic opening (“Sparse breaths, then none – / and it was done”) to the self-description of a “clumsy, husbandly / bedside manner” and the honest facts about the unsightly truth of illness (“sibylline binge / of gabble, rant and swear-words”), the series is always “moored fast / to the physical facts / of this singular life”. As such, the poems have a wholesome quality quite distinct from the earlier work. A Scattering will surely be Reid’s masterpiece; and this wonderful and timely new collection shows how an awesome poetic talent gradually attained such greatness.