Christopher Reid’s wonderful, calming new collection The Late Sun is a patchwork of sunlight and shade. The opening poem, Photography, set in a sunny restaurant before lunch, ends contemplatively:
What I can see and am smitten
by is a cool, square depth
of shadow and nuance,
fixed for an instant, an age.
...In several poems set in Greece and Spain, the holiday mood uplifts, offering a chance to bask in truant happiness. And even though the title poem, a contrived obituary to the sun, leans towards doom, it cannot extinguish a heartwarming collection in which older-and-wiser poet and child converge – in sun and shade.
