The curiosities - Christopher Reid

The Curiosities is the eleventh book of poems from this most inventive and celebrated of British poets. Clustering around the letter 'C', the seventy-some poems that comprise this collection celebrate a lexicon of lived experience through a single letter of the alphabet. Here we find tales of cufflinks and costume, cougars and cochineal, catapults and cavalry, even canoodlings in canoes. With a characteristic sleight of hand, Christopher Reid shifts deftly between seriousness and play, elegy and anarchy in this sometimes-zany, sometimes-haunting compendium of bright-eyed verses. Here and there the story-telling roams and sweeps: here are tales 'for' friends and loved ones, there are tales 'after' the great poets of history. But whoever and whatever the mode of address, these poems are frequently underpinned by a unifying humanity. The Curiosities is a temptatious read, full of wisdom and surprise, humour and lament, and is a poignant and convincing reminder that in a world where 'nobody's allowed to live forever', life is for celebrating, and grasping by the collar.

Christopher Reid is the author of many books of poems, including A Scattering (winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award 2009), The Song of Lunch, Nonsense and The Curiosities. For his first collection of poems for children, All Sorts, he received the Signal Award 2000. From 1991 to 1999 he was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber, where T.S. Eliot once worked. His Letters of Ted Hughes appeared in 2007 and he is now editing a selection of Seamus Heaney's correspondence for publication in a few years' time.