With his first book of poems, Arcadia (1979), Christopher Reid won both a Somerset Maugham Award and the Hawthornden Prize. His second, Pea Soup (1982), showed him developing the line of defamiliarising metaphor that had associated him, in the public mind, with the so-called Martian School. With his third, Katerina Brac (1985), however, he surprised readers with something quite different: a volume purporting to consist of translations from the work of a foreign poet, whose nationality and language remained undisclosed.

Subsequent volumes have confirmed Reid’s restless spirit of enquiry and invention, adding new, imaginatively oblique approaches, assumed voices and authentic translations to his repertoire. The present Selected Poems follows his career as far as A Scattering, the set of elegies for his late wife that was named Costa Book of the Year for 2009.