The Curiosities is the eleventh book of poems from this most inventive and celebrated of British poets. Clustering around the letter'C', the seventy-some poems that comprise this collection celebrate a lexicon of lived experience through a single letter of the alphabet. Here we find tales of cufflinks and costume, cougars and cochineal, catapults and cavalry, even canoodlings in canoes. With a characteristic sleight of hand, Christopher Reid shifts deftly between seriousness and play, elegy and anarchy in this sometimes-zany, sometimes-haunting compendium of bright-eyed verses. Here and there the story-telling roams and sweeps: here are tales'for' friends and loved ones, there are tales'after' the great poets of history. But whoever and whatever the mode of address, these poems are frequently underpinned by a unifying humanity. The Curiosities is a temptatious read, full of wisdom and surprise, humour and lament, and is a poignant and convincing reminder that in a world where'nobody's allowed to live forever', life is for celebrating, and grasping by the collar.

Christopher Reid is the author of many books of poems, including A Scattering (winner of the Costa Book of the Year Award) and The Song of Lunch (both 2009). From 1991 to 1999 he was Poetry Editor at Faber& Faber, where he worked with Ted Hughes on such books as Tales from Ovid and Birthday Letters, and later he edited Letters of Ted Hughes (2007). He is now a freelance writer and lives in London. His most recent book is the comic verse tale Six Bad Poets(2013).