Friends reunited

Zanzotti’s in Soho: redolent of surreptitious lunches fondly remembered, with its red gingham cloths and crusted tricolore paintwork, its ‘chianti-in-a-basket./ Breadsticks you snap/ with a sneeze of dust…And Massimo himself/ touring the tables / with his fake bonhomie.’ An old haunt, and the setting, in Christopher Reid’s poem ‘The Song of Lunch’, for a reunion between former lovers, ten years on — or could it be 15?

Zanzotti’s in Soho: redolent of surreptitious lunches fondly remembered, with its red gingham cloths and crusted tricolore paintwork, its ‘chianti-in-a-basket./ Breadsticks you snap/ with a sneeze of dust…And Massimo himself/ touring the tables / with his fake bonhomie.’ An old haunt, and the setting, in Christopher Reid’s poem ‘The Song of Lunch’, for a reunion between former lovers, ten years on — or could it be 15?

Earlier this year Reid won the Costa Book Award with A Scattering, a haunting series of elegies on the death of his wife, which came out to great acclaim in 2009. Soon after, he published ‘The Song of Lunch’, a very different animal: this wry, subversive evocation of one dicey London lunchdate can be read aloud in under an hour, yet it conjures up whole lives within its brief compass. Now, this slim and diffident volume, published by the tiny literary press CB Editions, will be transposed to prime-time TV on National Poetry Day (7 October), with a cast that most writers would kill for.

Reid seems somewhat surprised, if gratified, by the turn of events. Is it the first time that a narrative poem like this has been adapted for screen? I wonder. ‘I think so,’ he says. ‘Poets such as Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage have written for television, of course, but I can’t think of another instance like this — though if you say that indignant readers are bound to come up with all sorts of examples.’