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Lunch in Soho with a former lover - but Zanzotti's is under new management, and as the wine takes effect fond memories give way to something closer to the bone. A mock-elegy for the heady joys of old-time Soho, The Song of Lunch displays the full range of Christopher Reid's wit, craft and human sympathy.
Christopher Reid's new collection is a quartet of works for voice, opening with the brisk and brightly coloured monologue of Professor Winterthorn - recently widowed, soon to be retired, who decides on impulse to attend a conference (on 'Nonsense and the Pursuit of Futility as strategies...') in California. He is a mordant observer, alert to the anomie of modern displacement - taxis, lifts, airports, lounges, hotel rooms - whose thin air seems at one with the loose change of widowhood, the having nowhere really to go. But adventure lies ahead, and sunshine, and Winterthorn is debonair if undeceived about the deceptions of grief. His strange ride ends on a note of recovery, with the world suddenly in focus again and brimming before him.
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 be...
The Late Sun asserts a balance between memorialisation of the recently dead and celebration of the vitality of the living. Early in the collection is a set of poems about the poet's mother, who died in great age after a life of exotic travel, and the poet's own travels, his sense of both place and displacement, are vibrantly explored in other pieces. The city where he lives - particularly, and somewhat unusually, in a sequence titled 'Smells of London' - provides many of the themes, but the civic glades and sparkling vistas of the Mediterranean are just as important, and the book adds up to an affirmation of international perspectives at a time when civilised values are increasingly threatened.
Explore fundamentals, strategies, and emerging techniques in the field of human-computer interaction to enhance how users and computers interact Key FeaturesExplore various HCI techniques and methodologies to enhance the user experienceDelve into user behavior analytics to solve common and not-so-common challenges faced while designing user interfacesLearn essential principles, techniques and explore the future of HCIBook Description Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is a field of study that researches, designs, and develops software solutions that solve human problems. This book will help you understand various aspects of the software development phase, from planning and data gathering throu...
I've rounded up a rowdy assembly Of my own Consequential Dogs As counterparts to Eliot's mogs. Mine are a rough and ready bunch: You wouldn't take them out to lunch . . . But if they strike you as friendly, funny, Full of bounce and fond of a romp, Forgetful of poetic pomp, I trust you'll take them as you find them And, at the very least, not mind them. T. S. Eliot's best-selling collection of practical cat poems has been one of the most successful poetry collections in the world. For the first time in company history a companion volume will be published. Originally conceived by Eliot himself, Old Toffer's Book of Consequential Dog poems are a witty, varied and exquisitely compiled as Eliot's cats.
At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to others. It is a fascinatingly detailed picture of a mind of genius as it evolved through an incomparably eventful life and career.
The Curiosities is the eleventh book of poems from this most inventive and celebrated of British poets. Clustering around the letter 'C', the seventy-some poems that comprise this collection celebrate a lexicon of lived experience through a single letter of the alphabet. Here we find tales of cufflinks and costume, cougars and cochineal, catapults and cavalry, even canoodlings in canoes. With a characteristic sleight of hand, Christopher Reid shifts deftly between seriousness and play, elegy and anarchy in this sometimes-zany, sometimes-haunting compendium of bright-eyed verses. Here and there the story-telling roams and sweeps: here are tales 'for' friends and loved ones, there are tales 'after' the great poets of history. But whoever and whatever the mode of address, these poems are frequently underpinned by a unifying humanity. The Curiosities is a temptatious read, full of wisdom and surprise, humour and lament, and is a poignant and convincing reminder that in a world where 'nobody's allowed to live forever', life is for celebrating, and grasping by the collar.
Six Bad Poets is a farce-in-verse by Christopher Reid. It follows the exploits and mishaps of a group of poets, whose destinies are more intimately connected than they themselves can know, in their attempts to navigate the hazards of London literary society. Recklessness, fecklessness, blind ambition and enthralment to dark secrets are among the forces that drive these colourful and conflicted characters - three male, three female - towards their fates. Six Bad Poets is a fast-paced romp through a world that the author has observed closely over many years, and from which he reports with merciless accuracy, zest and humour.
The poems in this collection are presented as translations from the work of the eponymous Katerina Brac, who lives in a country, and writes in a language, that are never identified.'Reid's achievement in this book is to conjure up in very few words a life-system capable of supporting real poetry. He has never written more carefully and delicately.' Peter Porter, Observer'Sensitive, intelligent and highly inventive.' Stephen Spender