Selected Poems

Christopher Reid won the Hawthornden Prize and a Somerset Maugham Award for his first collection, Arcadia, and has since then adopted a variety of guises: as 'Martian' poet, as Katerina Brac - she being the fictional Eastern European poet of whose work his collection of the same name purports to be translations - and as Alfred Stoker, the 100-year-old visionary. Included here as well are poems from Reid's powerful and moving elegiac volume, A Scattering, which was named Costa Book of the Year for 2009. This is an essential introduction to the work of a richly resourceful poet engaged in what he himself once described as 'provisional negotiations with untidy life'.

Christopher Reid is the author of a number of books of poems, including A Scattering, which won the Costa Book of the Year Award, and The Song of Lunch. From 1991 to 1999 he was Poetry Editor at Faber and Faber, and worked with Ted Hughes on such books as Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters. He is now a freelance writer and lives in London.