A Scattering and Anniversary: Poems

By Christopher Reid

An exploration of love and loss by the renowned Costa Award–winning poet

You lived at such speed that the ballpoint script
running aslant and fading
across the faded blue
can scarcely keep up. Many words are illegible. I miss
important steps. Your movements blur. I want to follow, but can’t.

A Scattering is a book of lamentation and remembrance, its subject being Christopher Reid’s wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, who died of cancer at the age of fifty-five. First published in the UK in 2009 to wide acclaim, winning the Costa Book of the Year, this moving and fiercely self-reflective collection is divided into four poetic sequences. The first was written during a holiday a few months before Gane’s death with the knowledge that the end was approaching; the second recalls her last courageous weeks, spent in a hospice in London; the third continues the exploration of bereavement from a variety of perspectives; and the fourth addresses her directly, celebrating her life, personality, and achievements.

Paired for the first time with Anniversary, which was written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Gane’s death, A Scattering and Anniversary brings the poet into dialogue, again, with the wife he loved. A moving exploration of the stages of grief and how the “weighty emptinesses” that remain after bereavement change us, A Scattering and Anniversary shows us what it means to love, lose, and—forever changed—continue on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9780374716356

Christopher Reid

Christopher Reid is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London. A former poetry editor at Faber and Faber, he worked with Ted Hughes on Tales of Ovid and Birthday Letters among other books. A Costa Award-winning poet, Christopher is the author of A Scattering and Anniversary and The Song of Lunch.

Book preview

A SCATTERING

(2009)

THE FLOWERS OF CRETE

Blessed by the indifference of the creatures—

big, sting-toting insects on haphazard reconnaissance,

scampering ants with their matching shadows

     scampering under them,

the squeaky-wheel bird in some tree, and the one

with the white throat and flight

     full of flusters and feints—

we take our breakfast of coffee and yoghurt out in the sun.

Even the sun, that more dangerous beast, has begun

his morning prowl in a spirit of negligent generosity,

not seeming to mind, or to want to murder us, much,

but laying the landscape out in its ancient

     shapes and colours,

velvety ochres and greens on the steep hill,

     a blue-green

glaze on the bay, as if to say,

‘These are my wares. Yours more or less for the asking.

Of course I accept your paltry currency, your small change

     of days and hours.’

Bad old habit, but—

     because we’re in Crete,

I find myself doubling

the Minotaur

in his puzzle-lair

     (now the scarcely troubling

     rumour of a rumour)

with an immediate threat:

     your skulking sarcoma.

The first was dispatched

     by a trick with a ball of string;

the second cannot be reached

     by medical science.

Yet it seems its defiance

has been met and