A Scattering

“What will survive of us is love” Larkin famously tells us in his poem An Arundel Tomb. A Scattering, dedicated to Christopher Reid’s wife who died in 2005, is the ultimate tribute to this sentiment.

When Christopher Reid’s A Scattering scooped up the prestigious Costa prize last year, the critics stood to attention. Not only had the award been firmly out of the realm of poetry since Seamus Heaney won over a decade ago, but the book also presented a unique, and unshakeably poignant, theme: the death of Reid’s wife who lost her battle with cancer in 2005.

A Scattering moves through four sequences which provide a sweeping mural of the life, death, and loss of Lucida Gane. Perhaps surprisingly, this is no catalogue of hysteria.There are no ululations, no pleads to “stop all the clocks”, not even a real sense of finality. Rather, the book offers a moving and unflinching deliberation of loss by exploring the physical and immaterial evidence of Lucinda’s life.

Reid is adamant not to glorify death and dying, nor to imbue them with any mystery. Cancer is cancer, a tumour a tumour, he tells us: “No imp or devil / but a mere tumour / squatted on her brain”. There are no references to God or the afterlife and his frequent use of the words, “blessed” and “blessing” are without religious significance: “as a wise man said / ‘Death is not / an event in life.’ / Nor is it a journey.” If a prayer is being uttered here, it a secular one.

It isn’t until the last quarter, “Lucinda’s Way”, that we truly get to know Reid’s wife. Inch by inch, we tread towards gathering a delicate – but very vivid – portrait of her, peeking over his shoulder as he “interrogates the documentary evidence” of her life. His scrutiny permits her image to bloom, like a photograph, on the pages in front of us.

We discover her habits and humdrum activities: "You watched bad television, had me massage your neck, and /sewed/ lavishly beautiful patchwork quilts”. Her life narrative is stitched together as he relates how she came to London from South Africa with “old books and high hopes” and entered the theatre, “a big, ramshackle, blindly trundling machine. / With bits falling off”.

Soon we are invited in to the museum of her past, exploring her in fragments through the everyday objects which defined her: a gardening encyclopaedia read at breakfast; the cashew nuts and soup she survived on at RADA; her partiality to old doors; and her ‘home-made Turkish trousers’. But just as we grasp her character and essence, and forge a picture in our minds, the evocation slips away: “Wobble. Dissolve”.

It is a delight to glimpse Lucinda – and the exuberance of their years together – through the prism of Reid’s deft and artful poetry. In this poignant, startling and brave collection, it is not death which holds dominion, but life.

"the book offers a moving and unflinching deliberation of loss by exploring the physical and immaterial evidence of Lucinda's life"

"if a prayer is being offered here, it is a secular one"