Zanzotti’s in Soho: redolent of surreptitious lunches fondly remembered, with its red gingham cloths and crusted tricolore paintwork, its ‘chianti-in-a-basket./ Breadsticks you snap/ with a sneeze of dust…And Massimo himself/ touring the tables / with his fake bonhomie.’ An old haunt, and the setting, in Christopher Reid’s poem ‘The Song of Lunch’, for a reunion between former lovers, ten years on — or could it be 15?
Zanzotti’s in Soho: redolent of surreptitious lunches fondly remembered, with its red gingham cloths and crusted tricolore paintwork, its ‘chianti-in-a-basket./ Breadsticks you snap/ with a sneeze of dust…And Massimo himself/ touring the tables / with his fake bonhomie.’ An old haunt, and the setting, in Christopher Reid’s poem ‘The Song of Lunch’, for a reunion between former lovers, ten years on — or could it be 15?
Earlier this year Reid won the Costa Book Award with A Scattering, a haunting series of elegies on the death of his wife, which came out to great acclaim in 2009.
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