Poet Christopher Reid talks about winning the Costa book of the year
Christopher Reid on how he turned the death of his wife into a prize-winning poetry collection
Do you feel a kinship with grieving elephants, I ask Christopher Reid? "Absolutely. I'm empathetic with anything that's clumsy or inarticulate." This isn't quite as daft a question as it sounds: on Tuesday evening, the 60-year-old poet won the £30,000 Costa Book of the Year prize with a heart-breaking volume called A Scattering, which is a tribute to his wife, the actor Lucinda Gane, who died from brain cancer in 2005. And the scattering Reid has in mind isn't so much the scattering of ashes, but what bereft elephants do when they find the bones of their relatives picked clean by scavengers.
"I don't know if you've seen the films of what elephants do when they find these bones," says Reid, "but it's terribly moving." He describes it in the book's title poem: elephants, broken-hearted and clumsy, "hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them this way and that way". The poem goes on:
And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura.
Reid invokes these lumbering elephants in tribute to Lucinda, who was 55 when she died four years ago, writing, "may their spirit guide me as I place/ my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements".
A Scattering consists of four poetic sequences. The first was written during Lucinda's final illness and describes a holiday the couple took on Crete after discovering that she had only a year and a half to live. The second, about his bedside vigil, was written six months after her death. The third, a series of vignettes called A Widower's Dozen, finds him adrift in loss.
Among the most affecting of those vignettes is one in which Reid wonders why we cry. "I really can't explain tears, though I shed enough of them," he says now. "Somebody told me animals cry because they need to signal they are vulnerable to other animals. But speaking as an animal, I don't always want to show vulnerability because it opens you up to being attacked."
Another vignette finds him wandering past the hospital where "she willed her body to medical science", musing to himself: "that's where my dead wife lives. I hope they're treating her kindly." Her posthumous fate, suggests Reid (who has no religious faith), seemed preferable to heaven or hell:
My wife is in there, somewhere, doing practical work:
her organs and tissues are educating young doctors
or helping researchers outwit the disease that outwitted her.
So it's a hallowed patch of London for me now.
The book's last sequence, Lucinda's Way, is the sweetest – a fond remembrance of a lovely sounding marriage, one in which she never threw away a scrap of his writing "without kissing it first", and in which Reid, as he puts it, was "second always to you, the dashing heroine".
"By the time I had written the first three sequences," he says, "it became clear that the thing was to address her and I knew that would be necessary for myself spiritually and emotionally."
Reid denies, though, that writing A Scattering was therapeutic. "The problem never goes away. Writing does perhaps help put your own feelings in order. Forster wrote in Aspects of the Novel, 'How do I know what I think until I set down what I say?' That's a very common experience: thoughts get form in the writing of them down. I was conscious of the different stages of grieving – that is what the book is about."
The book, then has double function: a tribute to her and part of grief's unending work for him. A Scattering, though, is not merely a solemn elegy. There are marital jokes, impish rhymes and wilful metaphors that strain, in their jaunty inventiveness, against the harrowing subject matter. "I wanted to get the spirit of our marriage. Lucinda was always insistent on that – that writers be truthful. She liked so much to laugh."
Reid, along with his one-time mentor Craig Raine, is an exponent of so-called Martian poetry, which self-consciously strives to use curious visual metaphors and to describe the familiar in unfamiliar and insightful ways, as though through the eyes of a Martian (Raine's 1979 collection of poetry A Martian Sends a Postcard Home is a key text).
And, though the Guardian's reviewer rightly argued that this book is the least "Martian" of Reid's poetry, A Scattering is shot through with unlikely metaphor and unfamiliar takes on the quotidian. That Reid should find sprezzatura (Italian for a kind of studied nonchalance) in elephant bereavement is surely Martian. "I can't help but write Martian," he says, "though I am somewhat naturalised to human society these days." As if to clinch the point, Reid directs me to the key metaphor in the book's first sequence, The Flowers of Crete, in which the seemingly unvanquishable Cretan minotaur is a metaphor for Lucinda's indestructible sarcoma. The unbearable difference, of course, is that while the minotaur can be slain, Lucinda's cancer can't:
The first was dispatched by a trick with a ball of string
the second cannot be reached by medical science.
What's most striking about the poems, to me, is that the dying Lucinda emerges as the life force of the relationship, while her husband seems bewildered into stasis. "That is what happened," muses Reid. "She was the élan vital in our relationship. For about a year I was dancing attendance on Lucinda or prostrate with grief. Which is what I was: prostrate."
We're sitting over coffee in his north London home. With his wispy hair and kind, boyish eyes contradicting his forehead's filigree wrinkles, all he needs is a battered top hat to make him look like a gold-hearted Dickensian goodie, a Pip of late middle age. This house figures in the poem. Reid writes: "I live in a memory/ the size and shape of a house." He continues to live here alone (the couple had no children), haunted by heartening memories. Reid, for instance, writes of how often he and his wife passed each other on the stairs:
While the innumerable air kisses
we exchanged in passing
remain suspended to this day,
each one an efficacious blessing.
Out of the kitchen window is the garden in which Lucinda, whom he describes in the book as "a lone Eve", would lose herself to planning, planting and pruning. Reid tells me he has been pleased to see the snowdrops and hellebores that she planted have survived the recent snow. "You're still to be found there if I look carefully," he writes of the garden he admits he neglects.
"I was in awe of her, certainly," he says, looking into his coffee cup. "That was part of our relationship." They met, both aged 27, he an aspiring poet, she an aspiring actor. The venue was a dinner party at which both were subject to a piece of matchmaking gone awry (it sounds, as Reid describes it, like something from Jane Austen's Emma). Christopher and Lucinda found that they fancied each other more than the guests they'd been set up with. They were married for 30 years. Seventeen years before her death, she suffered breast cancer. "That time she was angry with the cancer. When she got brain cancer and was told she was going to die, she was more accepting."
During their marriage, Lucinda's acting career never flourished quite as either hoped. She became most famous for her performance as a science teacher in Grange Hill. In A Scattering, Reid laments:
But I never saw you in either Shakespeare or Chekhov,
your two great loves.
I never saw you in the parts they wrote for you. Nobody did.
Sometimes, as in the text just quoted, A Scattering makes the reader feel they're shamefully earwigging on a private conversation. Why did you decide to publish? "I suppose the answer is that I'm a professional writer and I like making books. I actually made books of these poems for private circulation and then, when Craig [Raine, as editor of Areté, the arts tri-quarterly magazine and book publisher] offered to print it, I was very happy. He takes such delight in producing beautiful books."
Didn't you have compunctions about making your marriage and your wife's death so public? "I don't feel guilty in writing about it, though it is strange that my best work came from the worst thing that's ever happened to me. I assumed that that was my task, what I had to do. She knew I would write about her fatal illness." Indeed, Reid had written about her before: "She said to me once: 'Why do you always write about me when I'm ill or in bed?' She would, I think, have liked what I have written."
I ask Reid if he has been able to write anything beyond the shadow of grief. By way of answer he tells me about his recently published comic narrative poem The Song of Lunch, about a publisher going out for a boozy lunch with an old girlfriend. "It was fun to write about an incident like that in as much detail as possible. But then I realised that it was a reworking of Orpheus and Eurydice, about the failed attempt to bring a loved one back to life. So I'm in a sense still writing about Lucinda."
Reid says he is pleased that a book of poetry won the Costa, though never expected, as he sat in Quaglino's restaurant at the prizegiving on Tuesday night, that it would. He didn't even put a few bob on himself to win, though he could have got good odds. "I've already lost two poetry competitions this month [the Forward prize and the TS Eliot], so this was a nice surprise," he says.
It's also one that restores poetry to a more prominent role in British literary life than it has had for a while. "It's hard to imagine, isn't it," says Reid, "that poetry could be in fashion? But in Byron's day, thanks overwhelmingly to Byron, it was. My winning this prize is a nice reminder that not all books are written in prose." But it's also worth pointing out that on the rare occasions poetry does triumph in mainstream literary awards such as the Costa, the judges usually go for some kind of elegy. Thus, Reid is only the fourth poet to win the overall Costa (or Whitbread as it was known under its earlier sponsor) and of those four, three have been honoured for elegies. There was Douglas Dunn's Elegies in 1985, Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters in 1998 and now A Scattering.
Was Reid influenced by Hughes's last book of poetry? After all, he is steeped in the Yorkshireman's life and work and has edited his letters. Surely there is a close parallel between A Scattering and Birthday Letters, the latter a collection of poems that Hughes wrote to his dead wife Sylvia Plath? "It didn't cross my mind at the time, but there's a strange correspondence, yes. Ted's poems, though, are not so much elegiac as documentary."
I ask Reid about a line in A Scattering in which he writes, with great love, about Lucinda's performance in her last days in the hospice:
It was inspired
brave, funny and subtle
of her to interpret
the role of patient
so flat against type –
cheering her nurses,
feeding advice and support
to friends, encouraging
her husband to address his
possible future
with something of her hope.
It's not in his nature,
but he can try.
Did her encouragement work? "It did and does," says Reid. "I'm getting better at it. Thanks to Lucinda. Always thanks to Lucinda: she made my life three-dimensional. Without her, I would have fallen flat."
gray[/hr]
Refer to: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/ ... d-poet-costa-winner |
分享
淘帖
