The Curiosities
Published on 5. May 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
96 pages
978-0-571-32296-1 (ISBN)
Description
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.
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.
More details
Edition
Main
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 197 mm
Width: 131 mm
Thickness: 5 mm
Weight
125 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-571-32296-1 (9780571322961)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Person
Christopher Reid is the author of many books of poems, including A Scattering (winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award) and The Song of Lunch (both 2009). From 1991 to 1999 he was Poetry Editor at Faber & Faber, where he worked with Ted Hughes on such books as Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters, and later he edited Letters of Ted Hughes (2007). He is now a freelance writer and lives in London. His most recent book is the comic verse tale Six Bad Poets (2013).