Christopher Reid’s A Scattering — a collection of poems written in honour of his dead wife, the actress Lucinda Gane — won the 2009 Costa Award. Reid will be reading selected poems from that collection at the South Bank Centre later this month, as part of the forthcoming exhibition examining attitudes to death and grief. Here, Reid talks to Matthew Richardson about his poetry in general.
Looking back over the collections excerpted in your new Selected Poems, has your career panned out as you hoped?
I don’t think the younger me had any clear expectations. A few vague hopes, possibly, but nothing so definite as to leave the older me feeling either satisfied or disappointed.
How do you think your work has changed?
Some gains, some losses. One inevitable loss is the youthful thrill of starting an adventure.
Your early collections are often bracketed as belonging to the ‘Martian’ school.
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