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 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.