RESULTS

For and After is Christopher Reid's seventh collection of poems. In a series of dedications and translations or "versions", Reid offers poems "for" friends and loved ones, as well as works "after" such influences as Homer, Aesop, Mallarme, Rimbaud and Baudelaire.

One of the finest and most moving collections of poetry this year may well turn out to be this new one from Christopher Reid, A Scattering. The book is a tribute to his wife, Lucinda, who died in October 2005 and it consists of four poetic sequences, the first written during her final illness, and the other three at intervals after her death.

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection begins when Hughes was seventeen, and documents the course of a life at once resolutely private but intensely attuned to other lives.