Christopher Reid will always, one imagines, be associated with the "Martian" tag, despite the experiments of Katerina Brac (1987) and "Memres of Alfred Stoker" and "Survival: A Patchwork" from his most recent volume, In the Echoey Tunnel (1991). In Expanded Universes he has produced a book which will no doubt surprise a few people who still cling to that dismissive shorthand. It is a collection of doggedly unmetaphorical miniatures, and focuses less on attractively defamiliarized domestic detail than on entire cosmologies; where Martianism was a way of seeing applied to the world, Expanded Universes is a worldly-wise look at ways of seeing.
The style, superficially simple and spare to the point of banality and bathos; it requires, paradoxically, extra attention. The mannered phrases which Reid has always been fond of – "that pious pair", "the insouciant slob" – and the dry, discursive or anecdotal tone are part of a fastidiously ironic delivery which recalls D. J. Enright's dry, sceptical humanism; the rhymes – both full and half – take on an exuberant self-delight at times which recalls Gavin Ewart in their vivacious childishness and James Fenton in their archly serious play. But what strikes one, by its absence, is metaphor, and all it stood for.
Reid's epigraph to the volume is the key to the collection: the sculptor Alexander Calder discussing his exhibition Universes. "They were so light in construction that they might have swayed a little in the breeze . . . . The circular forms, particularly interacting, seem to me to have some kind of cosmic or universal feeling."
The riddling metaphoricity of Martianism made the quotidian extraordinary once more; in Expanded Universes, Reid eschews such tricks, while conducting an implied discussion of the contrary pulls of mystification and analysis. For while the style is urbane, oddly donnish and ostensibly demystifying, that voice is being ironized even as it speaks; there is a sense that what is lost in such an approach is the ability to marvel. "Fetish" describes with delight an angel's wingbone which, although not validated for authenticity and thus financial value by the Orthodox Church, has a purely personal importance to the narrator who "almost religiously" loves it.
Religious dogmatism, with its improbable symbols and its blindness to alternative visions, is satirized elsewhere as the arcane wranglings of theories of being and belief; in "Quobblestack", for example, even when its title conflates scholastic argument with whimsy and humorous medley, or more seriously in "The Thing And The Book", a painfully successful faux naif sestina on the Rushdie affair. "Project" ("A fruitful line of research might be / good manners / in animals") takes only twelve lines to satirize pointless enquiry, anthropomorphism, and the fact that politeness is often a veneer for more feral desires.
The power of the individual imagination is fêted in numerous ways in a poetry which has ostensibly abandoned the brilliant fancy of Reid's earlier work. "Mermaids Explained" cruelly reduces myth to rational explanation, and puts the sirens' songs down to "A tinnitus compounded / of wind and birds' cries / and something on the brain / too wicked to think about."
Desire and creativity vie with a compulsion to explain; one of the most unsettling poems, "Tease", describes a strip-show in reverse, itself a teasing metaphor for the obscuring of truths and the compulsion for gloss and metaphor.
Expanded Universes is an exercise in, and a commentary on, debunking; while dogmatic points of view are teased and unsettled, the collection displays, between its lines, an enormous love for the fantastical and off-beat. The tour de force of these carefully positioned and world views comes in "Two Dogs On A Pub Roof", in which Garth and Rolf, the canines of the title, become emblems of "eternal foedom and non-stop strife, / The old Manichean fisticuffs".
A hundred lines of the same half-rhyme on "woof" make the point with verve, and an insistency which mimics, presumably, the unstoppable din of that conflict; "You're party to the party, however loth. / You're kin. You're kith. / You're living testimony to the preposition 'with'." Rarely can this gloomy thesis have been outlined so amusingly.
The Calder epigraph concludes "What I would have liked to have done would have been to suspend a sphere without any means of support, but I couldn't do it." Reid is almost there; the tantalizing skeletal constructions he has hung together in this slim volume show an artist with an impressive control of irony at its most sophisticated. It would be easy to underestimate the intelligence active in these apparently ingenuous little pieces.