Christopher Reid Biography

British poet, born in Hong Kong, educated at Exeter College, Oxford, where Craig Raine was his tutor. In 1991 he was appointed to an editorial position with Faber and Faber. Arcadia (1979) and Pea Soup (1982), his first two collections of poetry, gained him a reputation as one of the leading exponents of the Martian manner. The intense clarity and spatial economies apparent in the best of the poems suggest an almost transcendent quality. ‘Charnel’ and ‘Magnum Opus’ make explicit an elegiac sense of the absence of the numinous in modern secular culture. Katerina Brac (1985) deceptively purports to contain translations from the verse of a little-known Eastern European poet. As dramatic monologues the poems display very little of the Martian imagery common in Reid's earlier poetry. In the Echoey Tunnel (1991) and Universes (1994) renew the elegantly idiosyncratic wit characteristic of his verse and indicate a broadening scope.