Synopsis "Breaking the Surface"
Praise from reviewers of Ian Reid's previous booksRhumbs, Woods Hole, Mass. (USA), Pourboire Press'I like best his tough humorous approach and nearly epigrammatic style, his intelligence in using words and his width of focus - taking in not just the immediate situation but its context too. That's rare, now that so much verse is self-preoccupied, concentrating on the personal at the expense of thinking and feeling outwards, and without bringing up enough to justify the inwardness. Reid has always been able to relate in the opposite direction. To be humble and humorous about oneself is a lost art, but he has it. To look at the not-me with love and real interest and say something valid - Reid knows what poetry's for.' - Judith WrightUndercover agent, Adelaide, Adelaide University Union Press'Throughout Undercover Agent Reid places this uneasiness about living up to the Romantic ideal of man and poet insistently at the centre of his poetry, till we recognise in his procedure a dogged honesty. He becomes a keen and hard quester after what makes opportunities for poetry...a series of startling and versatile prose poems...an assured and authoritative syntax.' - Christopher Pollnitz in SoutherlyThe Shifting Shore, Grange Press (Vancouver, Canada) and Mattoid (Geelong)'There's a great deal of verbal flair, at times almost pyrotechnics, but the poems also have a terrific sense of place, of being located in a physical world inhabited by real people. All this gives the collection a human and physical solidity which is very appealing, and all the more because the language is full of tricks and surprises.' - Andrew Taylor'Reid approaches his subject with humour, precise imagery, and an emphasis on the aural... The poems discuss the self through extended metaphors so thoroughly that self and seashore merge, diverge and merge again. This is poetry of the littoral regions. In reading it one finds oneself standing on the physical, wet sand or in the conceptual territory of the individual psyche, depending on the tidal movements of each stanza and line... Not only a fine sense of the interstices between self and world, but an exceptional sense of imagery [moving] towards the fascinating territory that Reid calls "the ruffled edges of the real".' - Michael Wiley in Antipodes (USA)
