Spare a thought for the poor souls condemned to write poetry blurbs. Critics can argue for years – decades, centuries – over a single poem’s meaning, and fail to reach a conclusion. The task of summarising a whole book of verse in the space of just a few weeks gives a new dimension (albeit a minor, wafty one) to the term “Sisyphean”. Inevitably, therefore, publishers fall back on truisms. Hands up who’s picked up a poetry collection to find that – guess what? – the author has chosen to tackle themes of “life, death, love and loss”? So imagine, then, the relief with which the editors at Faber must have greeted Christopher Reid’s latest offering. This is one of those rare collections that lends itself to synopsis; its guiding principle can be summed up in just three words: the letter C.
Each of the 73 poems in The Curiosities is a meditation on a C-word (though never explicitly the C-word; more of what’s implicit later), from cufflinks to cravings to conversations to cabs. As USPs go, this one is so obtrusive that it risks reducing the whole enterprise to the level of gimmick, but, happily, Reid is too canny to outsmart himself like that. Thematic they may be, but these poems contain all the life, death, love and loss you could ask for, from the child who “woke to a cry not his”, via the “toxic / and irresistible rush” of an illicit affair, to the man who, in the wake of his wife’s death, “put a notice in the local paper” advertising for “a copy”. By organising them around a single letter, Reid has simply gathered his reflections and endowed them with a particular focus, providing the collection with a clarity and cohesion that compel you to read on.
Of course, there’s more to it than that – as that last sentence demonstrates. Although Reid appears initially to have restricted his fixation with the letter C to his titles, in practice, that’s the tip of the iceberg. By concentrating so intently on the letter, Reid irresistibly heightens our awareness of it wherever it occurs. Not only does your eye snag on every word that begins with a C, but you soon find yourself echoing Reid and thinking in C-words, too. I wondered, as I read, for example, whether the device would prove a constraint, or whether the titles would turn out to feel contrived (they don’t, mostly: there are only a handful of poems in which title and subject strain to fit). Reid is writing to a rule that is so simple it seems at first glance to border on the banal, but he manages to change our relationship with language both within and without the poems. It’s no mean feat.
And the poems themselves? Beneath the C (as it were), the collection has two clear strands which, in homage to Reid, can loosely be labelled the corporeal and the classical. The body – mortal, vulnerable, tugged by tides of desire – is his central preoccupation. A decade on from the death of Reid’s wife, whom he elegised in his Costa-winning A Scattering, an awareness of mortality continues to infuse his writing, but it is mixed with a new acknowledgment that life must and will go on.
Sex is everywhere here, present in what Reid himself terms “unsubtle innuendo” (an ode to “the first cherry of summer”; chocolate placed on a “moist and acquiescent tongue”) but also in moments of eye-watering exposition. For all his frankness, though, he holds himself at one remove from the action, observing rather than partaking, and addressing the subject with a wry humour, which mostly works but occasionally misses its mark. His pleasingly ironic paean to “The Couch”, unacknowledged star of countless porn films, for example, is leavened and complicated by his claim that, unlike the actors, it “acquits itself / with something like grace”. “The Craving”, on the other hand, about a “friend” who “wanted to bed a schoolgirl” but has to make do with a woman who “must have been about 30 years older / than the average O-level candidate”, treads a razor-fine line between satire and straight-up misogyny.
If sex is important here, though, an engagement with the deep past of the classical world is equally so. The collection overflows with retellings of Greco-Roman myths (Diana recast as a “strapping highland shepherd girl”, “skinny-dipping in a chilly pool”), references to the likes of Orpheus, Alcestis and Theseus, and reworkings of poems from the minds of Sappho and Theocritus. In “The Curse”, Reid delivers a lovely translation of Catullus’s furious, heartbroken “Words Against Lesbia” (“my love … thanks to her, has died / like a flower in some remote meadow, / clipped by the passing plough”), and I realised, reading it, that the whole collection owes a debt to him: the bawdy, gossipy, skewering poems rounded out by moments of clenching beauty. In “The Calm”, which tells the story of a crew member on a becalmed sailing ship who “under that curse / of peace … took up a sperm tooth / and a sail needle, enthused to try / some scrimshaw work”, the lines’ rhymes and rhythms lock together like the encircling ice and force us to slow down and take it all in. It is in stripped-back moments such as this, rather than via techniques and devices, no matter how clever, that Reid’s true talent is revealed.
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