Description - Toys / Tricks / Traps by Christopher Reid
In Christopher Reid's marvellous new collection, a schoolboy furtively andthrillingly drops a marble through the top of his desk so that it makes its wayin darkness along a complicated chute of books, rulers and rubbish, only toemerge from a hole in the base and be caught deftly in his other hand. Thepoem is titled 'Homeric' and might serve as a clue to the mood and constructionof the collection in general, where the poet, now in his seventies, seeksto track down and commune with his much younger self. It is an investigationthat tests Wordsworth's 'the Child is father of the Man' by contriving a seriesof transtemporal encounters between two selves who may now, conceivably,begin to understand each other.
Reid was born in Hong Kong and, thanks to the roving nature of his father'semployment, spent some of his childhood in foreign places. Most of the locationsin this book, however, are the Britain of the 1950s and '60s - perhaps, atthis distance in time, no less exotic. As the poems move from pre-verbal experienceto adolescence, the younger self is captured in scenes that illuminatethe steps by which a man - a poet - has been raised. Another poem conjuresup the childhood of Henry James in order to reflect on 'the large part /mysteryplays in both childhood and art', a proposition that the book as a whole maybe said to endorse through both its wondering gaze and its ingenuity.
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