Synopses & Reviews
Since 1976, Christopher Reid has been startling and delighting readers of poetry. His philosphic concerns are often expressed in small, domestic details, but, as with the Metaphysical poets he admires, the effect heightens his poetry's seriousness and impact. Reid finds significance in the marginal, the endangered, the apocryphal, and the absurd. His verse, which has earned him both the distinguished Hawthornden and Somerset Maugham Prizes, is subversive and highly intelligent.
The Pultizer Prize-winning poet Charles Simic provides a welcome introduction to one of England's most distinguished and original voices.
Review
Praise for Christopher Reid
"Reid is a poet who lives on in the mind, becomes part of one's own inner vocabulary. In every poetic generation there are not more than one or two like that."-Poetry Review
"Our most jaunty, disturbing poet . . . The poems are at once quietly canny in their verbal simplicity, and wildly ambitious in their reach."-The Observer (London)
About the Author
CHARLES SIMIC was born in Belgrade and emigrated to the United States in 1954. He is the author of many books of poetry and prose. Among other honors, he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 and served as the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2007-2008.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Author's Note ix
Foreword xi
Black Bananas
Poems from Arcadia (1979) and Pea Soup (1982)
Arcadia 3
A Whole School of Bourgeois Primitives 4
A Holiday from Strict Reality 6
Our Commune 8
H. Vernon 10
Three Sacred Places in Japan 11
Dark Ages 13
Bathos 14
The Ambassador 16
The Traveler 18
Folk Tale 20
Katerina
Poems from Katerina Brac (1985)
Pale-Blue Butterflies 23
A Tune 25
Son of Memory 27
When the Bullfrogs Are in Love 28
Epithalamium 29
Annals 30
The Oriental Gallery 33
History and Parody 34
An Angel 36
Realism 38
Eyebrows Almost Spoke 39
The South 40
What the Uneducated Old Woman Told Me 41
Apollinaire 43
A Box 45
The Sea 46
Traditional Stories 48
The People among Whom I Live 50
Screens 52
Heaven and Earth 54
Meditational Exercise 55
Lines from a Tragedy 58
Like a Mirror 59
I Disagreed 60
Patchwork
Poems from In the Echoey Tunnel (1991)
In the Echoey Tunnel 63
Amphibiology 64
Contretemps 65
Hotels 66
Caretaking 69
Consulting the Oracle 71
Romanesque 73
Balloonland 76
A Perversion 78
Klangfarbe 79
Dreams of Babylon 80
Survival: A Patchwork 83
Mermaids Explained
Poems from Expanded Universes (1996)
Fetish 101
Project 102
Epigone 103
From Information Received 104
Stones and Bones 106
By the By 108
Moment 109
Mermaids Explained 110
Nature 111
Dear Diary 113
Scenes from Kafka's Marriage 114
Feathers 116
Fly 118
Cycle 119
Insofar 120
Intelligentsia 122
The Thing and the Book 123
Two Dogs on a Pub Roof 125
Cobweb 129