Poetry review – TOYS / TRICKS / TRAPS
James Roderick Burns admires Christopher Reid’s tightly focussed examination of childhood
Toys / Tricks / Traps
Christopher Reid
Faber & Faber
ISBN: 978-0-571-37661-2
87 pp £12.99
Aside from its notable, eye-catching title (those forward slashes, and the spacing, quite intentional, suggesting a fragmentation of time and attention the book consistently shuns), Toys / Tricks / Traps is an unusual collection in another way: it places attention squarely on the poet’s childhood and youth, singling out an ideal age of experience (eleven) then orientating the language of each poem to that focus.
little like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (indeed might be making a glancing reference to Joyce’s experimentation) except that Reid, instead of developing the language of the text in lockstep with the developing sophistication of a central character, fixes that character in the sparkling perceptions of one key part of the developmental process, allowing a consistent vision to illuminate the experience of childhood both backwards and forwards from a central anchor-point.
It begins with an instruction: “searching backward/look at the phases of your childhood,/and locate just when you were happiest.”
Since you ask, I am eleven,
ambivalently poised between
the years of bumbling forward and the great teen
turmoil
(‘Mystery of the Two Ages’)
It is the perfect age for perception, no longer loose and unfocused, with a child’s heady spontaneity, but neither sideswiped by the hormonal obsessions of adolescence. Fresh enough to see, feel and remember, in other words. Such is the spine of the book.
From it grows a wide range of interesting work. Looking back towards childhood, and even further, Reid wittily characterises the process of memory – and of recovery, of recreation – as a deep-sea dive:
His withdrawal is so profound,
he may appear as good as drowned;
yet all too soon the interlude ends
when he resurfaces with the bends;
jolted groggily into light
from daytime’s false but friendly night.
(‘Shut-eye for the Old Man’)
The power and allure of re-entering the ‘golden hour’ of eleven is evident (each of the clean end-rhymes neatly snipping off the stages of being dragged back to the present). It recalls, in the words of ‘The Edge of the Table’ comparing the mechanism of a wind-up tin toy to unaffected childhood, the loss of moving from a shining past to different future:
delighted laughter
that was a mechanism
no less simple
and is now beyond mending
There is no nostalgia to the process – instead, the poet draws a rounded portrait of what was felt at each stage in time, as it happened, from his parents’ cigarette smoke lingering in the curtains to the moist smell of visa-stamp ink, a beautifully concrete image for constant shifts of time and place in his early life. This precision is fully present, too, in the rituals of learning, of doing:
Yet by degrees you are mastering the knack:
whacking that bald, almost unbouncing ball
again and again against a gable-end wall.
(‘You’)
At this perfect stage of life, we learn along with Reid, his feelings ours: inchoate, yet rounded by comparison with what came after; growing yet already gorgeously formed. The movements of the book are captured nicely in ‘Fog’, “A photograph of the nineteen-fifties: figures in fog.” This, of all memories, must surely be shifting and ragged with incomplete recollection? Not at all – black and white (despite deft use of colour, many poems have the crisp expression of b&w), as this is “all fog needs,/a slightly dirty white”) the fog descends
to give each a hug.
But it’s the opposite of Pentecost:
a freeze, a silence.
Fixed there, the figures, for all that,
are not lost.
This is the element in which they live;
where I lived, too.
Perhaps this is a hallmark of poets who were young and writing in the fifties. They first move from startling image to image, each perfectly suited to the mood and intended effect of the poem – in Reid’s case, adorning almost every page:
the squirm of newness and fragility (‘The Hero’)
Quick swat and swap
of conversational shuttlecock (‘Over My Head’)
fumbling tatters of misbegotten art (‘Kindergarten’)
dictionaries … spacious as daydreams (‘Little Self’)
a pair of compasses/whose maladroit pirouetting/swipes arcs all over the page (‘Theorem’)
As we move towards the close of the collection and the “voluptuous tumult” of adolescence (‘Jezebel’), they lie like small jewels scattered about the forest. But lead on to what? Towards sweetly-earned conclusions in luminous verse, the sort it seems poets publishing in today’s moment shy from instinctively:
It’s a scene, a tableau – the three of us
frozen, each in his different astonishment
(‘Elephant Trap’)
A tableau towards which the poet has signalled us backwards, and forwards, from the golden age moment on:
the pains it takes to know
just what is ‘going on’, and the large part
mystery plays in both childhood and art
(‘A Small Boy and Others’)
Reid has earned his plain, exact statement of findings. It is reminiscent (at least to me) of the difference in purpose between haiku (and there is a haiku set in the collection) with its rigorously sense-based, objective entering into nature and the broader, more subjective bond of image and philosophical conclusion found in tanka.
The whole effect, indeed the lasting effect of the book, is summed up in the poem first identifying the age of eleven as its pivot point, and ultimately needs no elaboration:
Since you ask, I am eleven,
ambivalently poised between
the years of bumbling forward and the great teen
turmoil, making of this provisional space –
admittedly a long way from heaven –
a sometimes merry and congenial place
Mar 8 2026
London Grip Poetry Review – Christopher Reid
Poetry review – TOYS / TRICKS / TRAPS
James Roderick Burns admires Christopher Reid’s tightly focussed examination of childhood
Toys / Tricks / Traps
Christopher Reid
Faber & Faber
ISBN: 978-0-571-37661-2
87 pp £12.99
Aside from its notable, eye-catching title (those forward slashes, and the spacing, quite intentional, suggesting a fragmentation of time and attention the book consistently shuns), Toys / Tricks / Traps is an unusual collection in another way: it places attention squarely on the poet’s childhood and youth, singling out an ideal age of experience (eleven) then orientating the language of each poem to that focus.
little like Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (indeed might be making a glancing reference to Joyce’s experimentation) except that Reid, instead of developing the language of the text in lockstep with the developing sophistication of a central character, fixes that character in the sparkling perceptions of one key part of the developmental process, allowing a consistent vision to illuminate the experience of childhood both backwards and forwards from a central anchor-point.
It begins with an instruction: “searching backward/look at the phases of your childhood,/and locate just when you were happiest.”
Since you ask, I am eleven,
ambivalently poised between
the years of bumbling forward and the great teen
turmoil
(‘Mystery of the Two Ages’)
It is the perfect age for perception, no longer loose and unfocused, with a child’s heady spontaneity, but neither sideswiped by the hormonal obsessions of adolescence. Fresh enough to see, feel and remember, in other words. Such is the spine of the book.
From it grows a wide range of interesting work. Looking back towards childhood, and even further, Reid wittily characterises the process of memory – and of recovery, of recreation – as a deep-sea dive:
His withdrawal is so profound,
he may appear as good as drowned;
yet all too soon the interlude ends
when he resurfaces with the bends;
jolted groggily into light
from daytime’s false but friendly night.
(‘Shut-eye for the Old Man’)
The power and allure of re-entering the ‘golden hour’ of eleven is evident (each of the clean end-rhymes neatly snipping off the stages of being dragged back to the present). It recalls, in the words of ‘The Edge of the Table’ comparing the mechanism of a wind-up tin toy to unaffected childhood, the loss of moving from a shining past to different future:
delighted laughter
that was a mechanism
no less simple
and is now beyond mending
There is no nostalgia to the process – instead, the poet draws a rounded portrait of what was felt at each stage in time, as it happened, from his parents’ cigarette smoke lingering in the curtains to the moist smell of visa-stamp ink, a beautifully concrete image for constant shifts of time and place in his early life. This precision is fully present, too, in the rituals of learning, of doing:
Yet by degrees you are mastering the knack:
whacking that bald, almost unbouncing ball
again and again against a gable-end wall.
(‘You’)
At this perfect stage of life, we learn along with Reid, his feelings ours: inchoate, yet rounded by comparison with what came after; growing yet already gorgeously formed. The movements of the book are captured nicely in ‘Fog’, “A photograph of the nineteen-fifties: figures in fog.” This, of all memories, must surely be shifting and ragged with incomplete recollection? Not at all – black and white (despite deft use of colour, many poems have the crisp expression of b&w), as this is “all fog needs,/a slightly dirty white”) the fog descends
to give each a hug.
But it’s the opposite of Pentecost:
a freeze, a silence.
Fixed there, the figures, for all that,
are not lost.
This is the element in which they live;
where I lived, too.
Perhaps this is a hallmark of poets who were young and writing in the fifties. They first move from startling image to image, each perfectly suited to the mood and intended effect of the poem – in Reid’s case, adorning almost every page:
the squirm of newness and fragility (‘The Hero’)
Quick swat and swap
of conversational shuttlecock (‘Over My Head’)
fumbling tatters of misbegotten art (‘Kindergarten’)
dictionaries … spacious as daydreams (‘Little Self’)
a pair of compasses/whose maladroit pirouetting/swipes arcs all over the page (‘Theorem’)
As we move towards the close of the collection and the “voluptuous tumult” of adolescence (‘Jezebel’), they lie like small jewels scattered about the forest. But lead on to what? Towards sweetly-earned conclusions in luminous verse, the sort it seems poets publishing in today’s moment shy from instinctively:
It’s a scene, a tableau – the three of us
frozen, each in his different astonishment
(‘Elephant Trap’)
A tableau towards which the poet has signalled us backwards, and forwards, from the golden age moment on:
the pains it takes to know
just what is ‘going on’, and the large part
mystery plays in both childhood and art
(‘A Small Boy and Others’)
Reid has earned his plain, exact statement of findings. It is reminiscent (at least to me) of the difference in purpose between haiku (and there is a haiku set in the collection) with its rigorously sense-based, objective entering into nature and the broader, more subjective bond of image and philosophical conclusion found in tanka.
The whole effect, indeed the lasting effect of the book, is summed up in the poem first identifying the age of eleven as its pivot point, and ultimately needs no elaboration:
Since you ask, I am eleven,
ambivalently poised between
the years of bumbling forward and the great teen
turmoil, making of this provisional space –
admittedly a long way from heaven –
a sometimes merry and congenial place