Six Bad Poets, by Christopher Reid - review

Is poetry in good enough health to be made fun of in this way? The irony is that this long, funny poem describing the incestuous peccadilloes of contemporary poetry’s social purlieus deserves to be read, and almost certainly will be read — and purchased — by far more readers than all but a few collections of poetry, even those by rather good poets.

Christopher Reid was known originally as a poet of the ‘Martian’ school, which sought to find new ways of looking at the familiar: ‘Splitting an apple, / I find a cache of commas.’ More recently he gained wider attention as the author of the award-winning A Scattering, a moving collection of poems about his wife in her last illness and his own life as an ‘inhabitant/ of an empty house’.