Mark Reid

Blindside, Mark Reid's fifth collection, exhibits his accustomed minimalist rigour, a spare and allusive lyric, contemporary, colloquial, committed, seeking the sublime in the everyday. Mark Reid's poetry has always delighted and challenged me. His distinctive voice and finely-tuned ear for just the right music has given his work a potency that's been hard-won. Reid is a craftsman. - Anthony Lawrence....

The Blessed Affliction is an apt title to describe thirty years of the work of Mark Reid. From the hospital poems (in the footsteps perhaps of Webb and Mackenzie) of Parochial to the divine disputations of later works such as The Address Book sequence, filtered through the ironies and ambivalences of poets such as Berryman, Thomas (R.S.) and Donne, Reid...