Christopher Reid: Poetic Reflections on Loss and Memory — ‘A Scattering and Anniversary’

Description

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, paperback

Published: August 1st, 2019

Publisher Marketing: 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.

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