Sunny side up

Christopher Reid has been writing poetry for nearly 50 years now, but it was only with the A Scattering (2009), a prize-winning volume of poems about the death of his wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, that he reached a wider audience at last. The midsection of his latest collection, Ordinary Morning Sunlight, is a suite of nine short pieces marking the 20th anniversary of that bereavement. It’s sandwiched between two apparently unrelated long narrative poems, each with their own fatalities. To describe the book as “about mortality” – though it certainly is – would nonetheless mislead: it’s very much about life in its finest details, conveyed with consistent vivacity and zest.

The novelistic title poem is set in an unnamed foreign country, with priests, olive trees, street cafés, statues of generals and terrorist groups. It contains seven units of five sections each, and each short verse within those sections describes, from outside and inside, one or more of its main cast members. These are a father and son; a café owner; a female junior civil-servant; the struggling musician with whom she has just slept; a dying elderly woman; a female guerilla; and a three-legged dog. With no names, just pronouns, it takes a while for each of them to become clear and distinct; and yet this investment of attention is swiftly repaid. Other characters appear – a tetchy priest, a teacher, a lecherous government minister, and so on – but it’s the multiple consciousnesses of the main cast that we follow, in Reid’s attentive and economical brush-strokes.

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