A Scattering and Anniversary

Description

This edition brings together A Scattering and Anniversary into a single book of lamentation and remembrance, its subject being Christopher Reid's wife, the actress Lucinda Gane, who died of cancer at the age of fifty-five. A Scattering was first published in the UK in 2009 to wide acclaim, winning the Costa Book of the Year Award. This moving and fiercely self-reflective collection is divided into four poetic sequences. The first was written during a holiday a few months before Gane's death with the knowledge that the end was approaching; the second recalls her last courageous weeks, spent in a hospice in London; the third continues the exploration of bereavement from a variety of perspectives; and the fourth addresses her directly, celebrating her life, personality and achievements. Pairing A Scattering for the first time with Anniversary, which was written to commemorate the tenth anniversary of Gane's death, this volume brings Reid into dialogue, again, with the wife he loved. A moving exploration of the stages of grief and how the 'weighty emptinesses' that remain after bereavement change us, A Scattering and Anniversary show us what it means to love, lose and - forever changed - continue on.

Christopher Reid is the author of many books of poems, including A Scattering (2009), winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award, and The Song of Lunch (2009). His latest collection is Old Toffer's Book of Consequential Dogs (2018). For most of the 1990s he worked at Faber and Faber, as poetry editor. He is currently editing a volume of Seamus Heaney's letters, to be published in 2022.