In a talk he gave on BBC radio in November 1980, Alastair Reid warned critics against attempts to isolate particular poems in particular moments of his history. Thematically, chronological development is far less important in his poetry than its cyclical quality; every collection returns to preoccupations that the poet has made central throughout his whole life. And yet, as Reid also acknowledged in that talk, historical placing of a poem provides it with an illuminating perspective. What in fact his poetry considers is the relation of the particular moment to the continuity: the view through a single moment to the fluid, multilayered continuum thoughtlessly called "I"; the perpetual rediscovery, or invention of selfhood, through the landscape of the present, which encloses the many landscapes of the past. A moment of epiphany in present time and space, the thrill of memory retrieving past places and past selves, triggers the sense...