Nonsense

Christopher Reid's new collection is a quartet of works for voice, opening with the brisk and brightly coloured monologue of Professor Winterthorn - recently widowed, soon to be retired, who decides on impulse to attend a conference (on 'Nonsense and the Pursuit of Futility as strategies...') in California. He is a mordant observer, alert to the anomie of modern displacement - taxis, lifts, airports, lounges, hotel rooms - whose thin air seems at one with the loose change of widowhood, the having nowhere really to go. But adventure lies ahead, and sunshine, and Winterthorn is debonair if undeceived about the deceptions of grief. His strange ride ends on a note of recovery, with the world suddenly in focus again and brimming before him.

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.