"Voluminous tits and flashing eyes": with this sanguine expression Christopher Reid introduces the figure of the bargirl in his poem "At the Green Man." You can see why her eyes would flash; it took him five syllables just to look up at them. But the phrase—adapted like the poem itself from Rimbaud's Au Cabaret-Vert—is a clinic in the stale and satisfied tone of Reid's book and his effort to borrow vitality from others. "Voluminous tits," tétons énormes in Rimbaud, tries to put the French poet's rakish slang in the mouth of the rather more cautious and straight-laced Reid, who, struck by the force of "tits," promptly overthinks his way to "voluminous" —an irresistibly poetic word containing both "luminous" and
"volume," and ample as the bosom it describes—and produces his ridiculous clash of registers, his leering tutor's fantasy:

Contentedly stretching my legs under the green-topped table,
I'm studying the décor, when—wa-hey! up flies
the bar-girl with her voluminous tits and flashing eyes.
(Getting past those defenses shouldn't prove much trouble.)

Reid characterizes "At the Green Man" as a poem "after Rimbaud" rather than as a translation of Rimbaud, and yet it is worth noting that his one wholly original addition is the bizarre yowl with which he greets the bar-girl's arrival. (He does move the setting from Charleroi to Hertfordshire; maybe "wa-hey!" is more of a Hemel Hempstead thing.)

About half the poems in For and After are translations of this sort. In each case one detects some hidden source of energy which has attracted the listless Reid, and in each case the transfer seems to work only one way; whatever Reid takes from these poems stays out of his translations, so that the book becomes almost a progress of pillaged classics, a literature diffidently vampirized. When he comes to the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon fragment "The Ruin," a great meditation on the wreckage of an ancient Roman city, Reid takes a poem which has been rough and vital for twelve hundred years and numbs it out of all recognition. Here are two lines from Michael Alexander's 1966 translation:

Mood quickened mind, and man of wit,
cunning in rings, bound bravely the wallbase.

And here is what Reid does with the same material:

It was a bold
             and ingenious conception:
the foundations
             could be made stronger
by a new system
             of metal girders
and linking bands.

The other half of the book belongs to new originals by Reid, most of them dedicated to others (hence the "for" in For and After). Many of the dedicatees are famous; Reid was poetry editor at Faber and Faber until recently, and writes like it. A benign corporate indulgence, a kind of halo of the uneditable, shimmers over meaningless constructions like the following, one of the "Nine Triangles" dedicated to the artist Breon O'Casey:

The world beyond
staying just the same,
only more so.

The rest of the book—apart from a mimicked phone call between George Bush and Tony Blair, which is a piece of rhetoric rather than a poem (the president coins the term "nomencluture," promptly alludes to St. Winston, then neglects to add "ly" to his adverbs)—follows in the same exhausted vein, routine and professional, like the figure in Joseph Brodsky's essay who "utters the creed's dictums with nostalgia rather than with fervor."

— Brian Phillips