Nonsense

Christopher Reid is part of an exclusive club of English poets in as much as he is genuinely funny. Though by no means a ‘comic’ poet – that tag hardly does justice to his extraordinary depth and range, nor to the poignancy of his subject matter — Reid is very adept at staring into the dull, gurning temptation of whimsy and then pulling out of it unscathed. His latest collection Nonsense (following on from 2011’s comprehensive Selected Poems) is saturated with the sort of brilliance that manages to provoke strong envy and even stronger admiration. He writes the sort of punchlines that you desperately wish you were accomplished enough to get away with – ones just falling on the right side of trite:

With satisfaction,
He buys online, immaterial tickets,
Fleet fingers preforming their keyboard tap dance:

Laptop dancers!

The collection’s opening sequence introduces the recently widowed Professor Winterthorn about to embark on a journey of perpetual befuddlement to an academic conference on “Nonsense and the Pursuit of Futility/as Strategies of Modernist, Postmodernist Literature and Art”. It would be tempting to sketch the parallels between the goodly Professor and Reid, whose poignant chronicle of his own wife’s death from cancer in 2010’s A Scattering deservedly won the Costa Award for poetry. Though there are very discernable similarities between Reid’s two collections notably in their mutually poignant humour and distinctive élan, it would be a disservice to Reid’s art to label his work as thinly disguised autobiography. Winterthorn’s journey hardly leads to a conclusive destination or cathartic moment of realisation, nor is it a departure into pure nonsense as the collection’s title may suggest. Sincerity is not rejected, but academic pomposity is given a broadest of broad-palmed swipes. One star lecturer at the conference is given a deliciously Edward Lear-esque summary dismissal:

Brannegan Wong
goes on too long.
Brannegan Wong
sings the same old song.
Brannegan Wong
with his luminous dong
and his numinous pong
comes on too strong.

However, Lear is not the only echo. As displayed in his wonderful collection Six Bad Poets, Reid is also a highly gifted mimic ; yet he is so gifted that the mimicry never strays into the blunter realms of pastiche. The faintest note of Milton’s “Sonnet XXIII (Me Thought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint)” is apparent in:

That night, Clarissa
Visits him in a dream,
But not in disguise,
As she often does;
She’s just herself
Thirty years younger.

The hint, or echo, is not an explicit allusion; but it characteristic of Reid’s finely honed understatement that he refrains from shoving the reader’s nose right into a source. Elsewhere in the collection, especially in Air’s and Ditties of No Man’s Land he is apt to invoke the ghosts of various WW1 poets. Typically, however, he eschews bombast in favour of subtle humour, as in the faint mockery of the pastoral strain present in so much of the War’s early verse:

He said, I’m no farmer
And maybe shouldn’t talk,
But this new-fangled agriculture
Ain’t going to work.

‘More to the purpose,
There’s nothing to eat’
At that, he relinquished
His uncomfortable seat…

Reid is a poet who, in his choice of subject matter and mode of approach, seems to have taken Wordsworth’s famous dictum that there are ‘thoughts that lie too deep for tears’, considered it and decided that if these thoughts are not treatable with tears then maybe they can be examined through laughter. “Touching, surprising and pleasurable” in the words of Craig Raine – this collection’s publication is truly a poetic event.

Francisco Garcia