Ed Reiss’s first book-length collection, Your Sort, is a wonderful addition to a body of English humorous writing that started with Edward Lear, and Lewis Carroll and ends up in the Mighty Boosh having come via the Goon Show, but also the warm ‘Englishness’ of Men from the Ministry, and Round the Horne. And Reiss has his own take on that Englishness as he notes in the poem ‘The Great’, in which one of his characters asks ‘rhetorically’, ‘You who cling to Englishness – which of you could say when Englishness/ supposedly began?
Reiss has the gift of, for the most part, exquisite comic timing, that knows exactly where to earn and place the punchline. And, for one of the first times in a review of a book of poems, it seems sacrilege to ‘give away the ending’, but the ending to the first poem in the book ‘Upstart’ is: ‘…because climbing Everest/as a tadpole//remains a minority interest/and always will’. Of course, I’ve just given you the punchline without the lead-in, but that first poem does illustrate a lot of what I’ve suggested: not only is there the genial surrealism of Reiss’s imagination, but there’s that instinctive opting for the little man, and the acknowledgement of the limitations I suggested earlier. In addition here, there is the quiet skill with the rhyming and (and you’ll have to take my word for this, the fact that this ending is beautifully earned. And the vast majority of the poems in this delightful book are just as achieved.
There are other poems in the book which are much less immediate but just as powerful. One such is the beautifully turned ‘Homage to Hieronymous Bosch’ which charts the contents of Bosch’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’, in terms of the relationship that was happening, while the painting was hanging on the wall. And while Reiss lists the items in the picture and other religious/Buddhist(?) elements in the environment, he draws the reader into a rich and satisfying portrait of a love affair.
Another thing I love about this book is that Reiss is totally unafraid to use vocabulary. In ‘Deep Cleansing’, Reiss describes the workmen’s tools; ‘including polypropylene clearing-rods-/with diamond-devil, sand-cone/drag-drop-scraper and badger fittings-‘. Reiss’s writing inclines the reader to trust in his knowledge and his naming; and as a consequence we trust his poems.
Ian Pople