Now then

Ed Reiss

£5
978-1-902382-83-8

First stage winner of The Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition.

Ed Reiss lives and works in Bradford.

HANDY STORES

Push the door – tinkling bell –
and you’re in the puzzle
of its atmosphere: a mustiness
of pet-food, sawdust, straw and compost,
lifted by a reek of paraffin.

The woolly dog lifts its head
from the deal-board floor and barks.
The budgerigar cheeps and a sly man
slips into the shop, or his wife
blunders (startled armadillo!)

through the frosted door.
They linger
with a dusting of resentment.

In the jumble, turn the wobbly stand,
absorb the pictures: plump radishes,
hearty lettuces, clustered asters.
And nasturtiums – dark green leaves
accentuating blazing-orange flowers.

Packets of rattly seed. A few coins
and they’re yours – yours to grow
their rambling greenery, to snap and chew
their peppery leaves, relish colours,
touch the trophy of soft flowers.

Reviews for Now Then:

This is a modest, friendly – almost cheeky — little pamphlet, from a poet whose cover bio reads: “Ed Reiss lives and works in Bradford.” A professional under-stater? Or perhaps a writer who knows how to disarm a reader conditioned by hype. In ‘Lots of Successful People and Me’, “Clive heads a leading hedge-fund consultancy”, Davinda, Francesca and Hannah perform equally significant functions in life and (last line) “I live and work in Bradford”. It’s engaging. This is a person you can like — if you identify with the quiet voice, the person who suggests rather than asserts, the poet who deems ‘poetic’ language distinctly dodgy.

‘Sharp Elbows’ is very good, and funny too. Clever. You keep thinking about it after you’ve read it, and each time you read it, you enjoy it all over again. The point is that ‘The radical is/ reappropriated by the very force/ it seeks to undermine’. Evidence to prove this is found in a work situation with which many could identify:

Take my boss, Slobber McJab,
purple-jowled, advancing sideways
in a swivel-chair towards me.
I stopped

him with a joke. Saying what
we mean and nothing but,
would put us on the spot
and land us in it, wouldn’t it?

Well yes, it might. It might. There’s a good range here in this little handy pamphlet: some tricksy stuff, and some emotive moments, a spare, judicious choice of epithet, and a sense of delight. Reiss is not easy to classify — always a good sign. He may live and work in Bradford but metaphorically speaking he is somewhere harder to find (though well worth looking for). The last lines of his poem ‘Branch’ are perfectly true:

I’m not sure where I am, but I’ve arrived.
I’m here to prove it.

— Helena Nelson; Sphinx Chapbook Review, 4.

These poems delight in people; they look into other people with affection and understanding. They are pleasingly detached from their maker in a confessional age. And they are also varied, intelligent, lyrical and well-made.

[This collection] is thickly populated with characters. Some appear in conventional roles, as friends, parents, a neighbour, a lover, shopkeepers. One is historical, the painter Klimt…. There are some strongly imaginative poems which I recommend highly.

Most of Ed Reiss’s poems are short, in short stanzas, in plain and economic language, and are formed with great care…

I like the variousness of these poems in theme and mood. They make a variety of points, usually unobtrusively; but I also like the minority in which no meaning is spelt out, but people or situations speak for themselves. Like all the best poems, Ed Reiss’s poems are things-in-themselves independent of their maker, new happenings in the world.

— Chris Preddle.  (Pennine Platform, No. 60, 2006. pp. 55-7)