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HomeGo to main siteEvents / other sitesTales of Hull & ERBook ReviewsFictionShort storiesNon-fictionPoetryAuthor - Annie WilkinsonAuthor - Avril Field-TaylorAuthor - Bruce EssarAuthor - Clive AshmanAuthor - Danny BirchAuthor - Daphne GlazerAuthor - David BrettAuthor - Dorothea DesforgesAuthor - Karen WolfeAuthor / explorer - Karl BushbyAuthor - Leslie WilkieAuthor - Linda AcasterAuthor - Nick QuantrillAuthor - Paul GenneyAuthor - Penny GrubbAuthor - Peter JonesAuthor - Richard SutherlandAuthor - Robert AdamsAuthor - Robert EdricAuthor - Simon KerrAuthor - Steven HallAuthor - Stuart AkenAuthor - Tim RouxAuthor - Tricia WalkerAuthor - Valerie WoodAuthor - Winifred HoltbyPoet - Andrew MarvelPoet - Andrew MotionPoet - Carol CoiffatPoet - Chris DawberPoet - Christopher ReidPoet - Cliff ForshawPoet - Daithidh MacEochaidhPoet - David WheatleyPoet - Frank RedpathPoet - Holly RoachPoet - Ian ParksPoet - Nick BoldockPoet - Pete MorganPoet - Peter ArdernPoet - Peter KnaggsPoet - Philip LarkinPoet - Stevie SmithPoet - TF GriffinPoet -Tony FlynnChildren's booksSports writingContact us
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Waterstones in Hull are extremely supportive of
Hull & East Riding writers, and carry a stock of many of the books mentioned on this site.
Christopher Reid was born in Hong Kong
in 1949, educated in England, and studied at Oxford University from 1968-1971. He then worked as a freelance journalist and
as book review editor of Crafts magazine. He won an Eric Gregory Award for his poetry in 1978. A year later his first
poetry collection, Arcadia (1979) was published, winning the 1980 Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize.
This has been followed by Pea Soup (1982); Katerina Brac (1985); In The Echoey Tunnel (1991);
Expanded Universes (1996); For and After (2002) and Mr Mouth (2005). A selection of his poems was
published in the US as Mermaids Explained (2001). He is often cited as co-founder with Craig Raine of the 'Martian
School' of poetry which employs exotic and humorous metaphors to defamiliarize everyday experiences and objects.
He has also written two books of poetry for children: All Sorts (1999) and Alphabicycle Order (2001).
He is the editor of two Faber and Faber collections: Sounds Good: 101
Poems to be Heard (1998) and Not to Speak of the Dog: 101 Short Stories in Verse (2000).
Christopher Reid has also published illustrations in
Punch and London Magazine, worked as Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber for eight years, and with his wife,
runs his own independent publishing house, Ondt & Gracehoper. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 1995, the 2000
Signal Poetry Award for his children's collection All Sorts, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
'Simply one of the funniest and most original poets
writing in England today.'
"Mermaids Explained"
As one angry buyer complained: "This book isn't about mermaids at all. I am most disappointed!"
Reid is a great poet. He is also a very accessible poet.
If you are looking for a book of poetry to get a friend or a young person excited about poetry, try this one. It's great
and what's more rare, it's funny. Product note: This is a only a selection of Reid's work from a number of collections,
but it's a good one.
"Katerina Brac"
(1985), Reid’s third volume, finds the perfect analogy for the visionary inadequacies of language: translation. Brac
is an invented Eastern European poet whom Reid has supposedly translated into English, hoping to have retained the flavour
of the original.
This is wonderfiul poetry: witty, inventive, assured,
managed with an economy of means, and like Martianism, obvious only in retrospect. Katerina Brac is an outstanding
collection, to which it is impossible to do justice briefly.
"Expanded Universes"
Among the people and creatures to be met in Expanded
Universes are the last sphinx in captivity, a flying prophet, the unorthodox compiler of a Contradictionary, Gertrude
Stein's little-known sister and two exceptionally loud-mouthed dogs, Rolf and Garth. Questions of belief and imaginative
freedom are approached from sometimes unlikely angles. Here Christopher Reid continues his project of finding significance
in the marginal, the endangered, the aprocryphal and the downright absurd.
"Sounds Good: 101 Poems to be Heard"
- a collection of poems edited by Christopher Reid
Rather than the usual reliance on rational
intelligence to "figure out" a poet's intended meaning, editor Christopher Reid suggests that "the ear
may understand a poem before the mind has been able to grasp it". This is therefore a collection of poetry chosen specifically for the way the poem sounds.
"Not to Speak of the Dog: 101 Short Stories
in Verse" - a colection of poems edited by Christopher Read
Themed poetry anthologies aim to introduce readers to
unfamiliar poems, and I suspect it is their editors' greatest ambition to entice readers for whom all poetry is unfamiliar.
How clever then of Reid, former poetry editor at Faber, to use narrative - the one thing prose readers most desire and fear
cannot be supplied by poetry - as bait. Once ensnared, they will find that Reid's definition of a story is refreshingly
(or misleadingly) broad. The majority of the 101 are well known, though they are taken from around the world and from the
first century AD to the present. The common link is frankly pretty weak. But whether they tell a story or merely paint a picture,
these are still captivating poems.
Also (click on title to go to Waterstones.com)......
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