An edited (shorter) version of this review first appeared in Poetry Salzberg Review in June 2025. Many thanks to the editor, Wolfgang Görtschacher, for commissioning the writing of it.
As the editor, Grevel Lindop, says in his Introduction to Collusive Strangers: New Selected Poems (Shearsman Books, 2024), the literary world has not taken enough notice of the remarkable oeuvre of Jeremy Reed. Many of his recent collections have appeared without much, if any, critical notice, so it’s to be hoped that this substantial new selection, from 1979 -2016, will bring this misfit-poet’s work back to more general attention. The problem is that the protean Reed fits no pigeonhole, plus the fact that he’s been astonishingly prolific. Intensity of perception and a phenomenal dynamism of language and creativity are his hallmarks, and he matches the best in nature poetry (Clare and Hughes), the decadent, urban flaneur (Baudelaire), then writes as Symbolist and Surrealist (Gascoyne), pursues sci-fi, focuses on pop and fashion, next becomes a portraitist and moving elegist. Even given these 300 pages, Reed – a sometime Peter Pan now into his 70’s – continues to be elusive. Compared to the prolific poet/novelist John Burnside, the difference is clear: we all knew what the brilliant, much-missed John was up to. With Reed, we are endlessly being caught by surprise.
Even Reed’s earliest work arrived fully formed. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the urban, neurasthenic wanderer appears in ‘Claustrophobia (Kings Cross)’, the narrator’s need being ‘so strong it might involve the police’. In contrast, ‘Dwight’s Brother’ is an early stanzaic, sci-fi piece, a character from the future obsessed with Manson’s and Nixon’s careers, and ‘the monomania that burns planets’. And the magnificent ‘John Clare’s Journal’ ventriloquises the nature poet’s concerns for the natural world of Helpston, his stumbling literary repute, and fear for the future of his children, ‘laid / out as corpses’. Reed’s ambition is clear from the start, and in a poem like ‘Visit to George Barker’ he evidently empathises with the older poet’s withdrawal and seclusion, his writing contemporaries being harshly judged for a lack of ambition as ‘poets whose very aim is minimal / gesture, earning [Barker’s] dismissal’.
My own first acquaintance with Reed’s writing was in the two volumes from Cape in 1984/5, By the Fisheries and Nero, when James Lasdun edited him. These particularly highlighted the Nature poems, for example ‘Conger’ which outdid Ted Hughes: ‘They’ll shave a finger off with precision, / clean as a horse bite, or close round a hand / and leave it as taut gristle strung on bone.’ In a quieter poem, the narrator is fishing in a harbour, near a ‘desalination plant’, the tautly strung reactions of a shoal of mullet seemingly reflected in the fisherman’s own alertness and nerves (‘By the Fisheries’). ‘Spider Fire’ plays brilliantly with perspectives as every sort of tiny beast and insect flees a wildfire, while the narrator, at a distance, observes ‘a black hoop / ironed into the shire’. Though the first-person pronoun recurs in many poems, Reed is usually not much interested in self-revelation. One wonders, if he was/had been, he might be more widely appreciated, because it’s not that he can’t do it. ‘Visiting Hours’, for example, is enough to make a grown wo/man weep as the narrator visits his father in hospital, economical with the truth that this is ‘terminal’, the child compelled to play the father, the father, ‘like a diver gone on down // to find an exit that was always there, / but never used’. In characteristic ABCB quatrains, ‘Changes’ perhaps records the poet’s re-visiting Jersey and a brother, or boyhood friend, who stayed behind as a farmer, both recognising ‘our youth survives, the present is a gap’. And Lindop includes two remarkable poems from the Nineties collection, in which we seem to get close to Reed’s own autobiographical difficulties, when personal survival seems ‘to be the question’ (‘Samaritans’), and, in ‘Prayer’, Reed addresses a divinity of an uncertain variety, pleading for illumination, for help, a hearing, a pointing of a way out, from guilt, dread, self-injury, poverty, ‘the unappeasable, involuntary / inheritance of lucklessness’.
But Reed deals with topics, rather than ‘issues’, and his work is descriptive in character, never preachy or judgemental, so he seldom offers us his ‘views’. The work is driven by his ‘curiosity’, which both ‘holds us to life and feeds us to the flame’ (‘Moth-Trapper’). His praise of the artist, in ‘Cezanne’, is revealing of his fascination for the ‘ordinary’ and for the shared knowledge that ‘the beautiful / is inherent in all that lives, / and once externalised in its true form, / remains as that’. Over and over again, Reed captures – hence externalises – the true form of things in the colourful, vigorous, unblinking poems selected here. And as the millennium approached, Reed extended his range even further towards ‘all that lives’. There are uncharacteristic political poems (Tony Blair is a particular target), but Reed also writes of the experience of AIDS, and with a Baudelairean dwelling on sexuality, in poems like ‘Transsexual’ and ‘Brothels’, and is drawn closer to popular culture, its fashions, music, and iconic figures. But many of the poems on Madonna, Billie Holiday, Elvis and The Rolling Stones drift to looser forms of summary and the decade from 1993 to the early 2000s contains less brilliant work, though 2006’s Orange Sunshine with its evocations of 1960s London marks a return to form.
Reed as elegist, as in This Is How You Disappear (Enitharmon Press, 2007), was perhaps unexpected, but poems like ‘Paula Stratton’ and ‘John Berger’ (not the art critic) must rate amongst the finest in that genre produced in the last 100 years. The honesty, attention to detail, the empathy extended to his subjects (Stratton was a drug addict; Berger a difficult Jersey friend and Nazi-collaborator), and the apparent ease and beauty of the writing, mean these poems ought to have been anthologised everywhere. The elegiac note is hardly surprising as Reed moves through his seventh decade and poems about socks, potted plants, tea, honey, and cupcakes seem to mark shifts in focus though Reed remains true to his repeated maxim that ‘everything I see [is] poetry’ (‘London Flowers’). The poems retain the vigour and speed that he admires in Plath’s work: ‘her fast ball imagery / on speed-trajectories [. . .] her plugged-in dare-all energies’ (‘Re-reading Sylvia Plath’). As he puts it in an extract from ‘White Bear and Francis Bacon’, Reed has remained true to his early ambitions ‘to kick poetry into near sci-fi / [. . .] like dirty-bombing the dictionary into my face’ and there are thrills to be had by any reader on every one of these 300 pages in which Reed makes so many contemporary poets look sluggish, mired in virtue signalling, lumbering in form, and monotone compared to his vivid technicolours.
Here is the whole of ‘Elegy for a Polka Dot Shirt’ from Orange Sunshine (2006):
Unreconstructed 60s
ostentation snowed on blue
labelled Jacques Fath, tailored fit,
fished from Retro on a simmmery
cloud hung-over August day,
bought for pop connotations –
high collar with flouncy points,
cotton married to the skin.
Medium size:
38 cm:
structured for a defined waist
sexless to the vanity
of ownership.
Affordable at £15,
the item begged me to retrieve
its showy staginess.
Outside, airless haze,
W11 backpacking crowds
random like footage spilled
into a documentary.
Later I tore a fragile seam
tracking towards left underarm,
the fissure sounding like hot oil
pronouncing itself in a pan.
The tear backtracked through history
to the anonymous wearer,
who bought sensation, sold it on
into a chain, the onion skin
thinning from use;
the scar re-sewn,
but evident, a little glitch
caught in the fabric like a blues
lament,
the singer head-bowed on a stool,
cooking up trouble, while the club
tug at his vulnerability
and modulate applause from hot to cool.
Robert Selby’s debut collection is fronted by a wood cut engraving by Clare Leighton, titled ‘Planting Trees’. Two flat-capped workmen labour to bed in a sapling. A wind-bent tree stands nearby; on the gusty skyline, at the top of a hill, a dark copse. It’s like something out of a Thomas Hardy poem, or an Edward Thomas one, and it’s well-chosen as these are the forebears The Coming-Down Time often explicitly acknowledges. Launched into a poetry world dominated by so many books addressing environmental, gender, race and identity issues, this collection (depending on your viewpoint) is either timeless or behind the times. Selby’s careful organisation of the poems makes it clear he knows what he’s doing and he will do it his way.
Selby’s use of language and form is likewise pretty traditional. It’s not just a result of the subject matter that the book is frequented by words such as smithy, shire, lambkin, deer-stalker, and lush-toned phrases such as “blossom-moted”. The flip side of this is that details of 2020 UK are often treated with a distaste, an alienated distance. Later in the book, a friend returns from the dust and pollen of the English countryside into London: “its tagged shutters and sick-flecked stops, / its scaffolding like the lies / propping up your peeling hopes”. The friend is female and (I think) Canadian. Another poem’s narrator tries to persuade her that “[t]his is the real England [. . .] It’s a place of trees; of apple, pear, cherry and plum”. There is more to be said here about the meaning of ‘real’ and it’s hard to tell if the narrator’s invitation is meant to have a deathly ring to it. He asks, “Do you want to reset your watch to the toll of here?”
The import of this question forms the emotional and dramatic context of the later poems in the collection which trace an on/off relationship. The narrator is left wondering: “I must wait for the needle / of your heart’s compass to unspin, / and see where it stops”. In reading that I’m reminded of Lea and – what seemed to be – her relative lack of choice in the earlier years of the twentieth century. There is a good deal of unalloyed nostalgia in The Coming-Down Time for an England of the mind, if it was ever part of any actual century. I find the female figures in the book suffer because of this: most of them do not achieve a specific, particular life in the poems. I’d like Selby to go on to explore the irony in two images: the masculine arms in “rolled up sleeves” that may or may not be “strong enough” and the closing lines just quoted, in which the desired woman bides her time, knowingly possessed of strength, of the agency of decision.
Martyn Crucefix 