Alastair Reid Biography

British poet and translator, born in Whithorn, Scotland, educated at the University of St Andrews. He has held numerous visiting posts at universities in the USA and elsewhere. He became a staff writer and correspondent with The New Yorker in 1959. His collections of poems include To Lighten My House (1953), Oddments Inklings Omens Moments (1961), and Weathering (1978), which carried a preface suggesting he had ceased writing verse. His poetry has an attractive lightness of touch that enables him to deal accessibly with paradoxically complex aspects of human experience. He has written numerous memorable poems of Scottish and American landscapes. He has translated the poetries of Pablo Neruda and Jorge Luis Borges, including Neruda's Isla Negra (1982) and Borges's The Gold of the Tigers (1979). His other publications include the travel writings of Passwords (1963) and Whereabouts (1987). An Alastair Reid Reader (1994) contains selected poetry and prose.