Weathering: Poems and Translations - Softcover

Alastair Reid has always been one of my favorite poets. . . . What he writes about are the interstices of life, the odd moments when clarity replaces the usual fuzz, when a mood takes hold and defines life along a fresh axis of understanding. . . . I go back to the poems in Weathering year after year, like memories of first love. This is what poems are for

Reid has the accumulated wisdom to go for the great poem wherever he finds it, in his own work, in his editing at the New Yorker, and in the poems of Pacheco, Neruda, and Borges, poems which alone could become the basis for writing classes, poems which deserve to be in every high school library, and poems such as Borges' 'Matthew XXV:30' which everyone should be required to read.

The book is a beautifully coherent presentation of selected poems from Reid's earlier volumes, together with new poems previously uncollected, that make up, in fact, a definition of a self. . . . It is a clear, exact, and often brilliant poetry that demonstrates the half-forgotten possibility of giving pleasure. . . . Weathering is a first-rate book by a first-rate writer. It belongs in every library and collection.