Mermaids Explained: Poems

Known to Britons since the late 1970s, Reid (along with Craig Raine) inaugurated so-called ""Martian poetry,"" which sough outlandish, sometimes comic descriptions of ordinary things and events. Reid then switched gears entirely: the stripped-down, simplified, contemplative work in his 1985 Katerina Brac claimed to translate a (fictive) East Bloc poet. Reid spent much of the 1990s as poetry editor at Faber & Faber, returning to print with restrained and elegiac series of poems. This selected volume is his first in the U.S. and contains poems from all of Reid's phases so far. The ""Martian"" work includes a jaunt through a zoo, where ""Spider monkeys,/ who nurse a dread/ of stopping still, play tag on their trapeze""; a poem about suburbia called ""Dark Ages"" explains ""This is our heraldry of dirt:/ a dog crappant on a lawn vert."" The Brac poems can be bathetic in their attempts at moral seriousness ""Every day, history takes place,/ even when nothing happens."" Yet others are as vivid as their Polish models: ""pale-blue butterflies"" make up ""an army composed entirely of stragglers the gust-driven trash of migration."" Later work tries hard to be at once charming and sad successes here include a sequence about domestic love and cancer and a four-page poem in couplets rhymed entirely on ""-th"" and ""-ff"" (loth, bath, shelf, Molotov). Reid is above all a reader-friendly poet, one whose undemanding tones and figures will strike readers here as reserved in the best English sense of the word. (Apr.) Forecast: A brief foreword from poet Charles Simic (whose work Reid's can resemble) should help draw fans to this belated State-side debut, and the Faber connection may draw some po-biz attention, but the book's release does not augur a second Martian invasion.