Poems that are both playful and truthful, nuanced and confronting

Christopher Reid's poetry is shaped by incisive intent disguised as playfulness and by a powerful resistance to decorum and convention. Ordinary Morning Sunlight operates on a scale that is simultaneously quotidian and timeless, moving easily between here and elsewhere, past and present, life and death. Its structure is novel - a set of elegiac lyrics flanked by a pair of unlike verse narratives - but for all their disparateness the three parts share concerns, most notably that of human behaviour in the shadow of mortality. Known for his formal inventiveness and the sharpness of his observation, the poet here offers a gathering of recent work that contrives to be both nuanced and confronting.