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’).