Running Late: Selected Poems

Martin Reed’s Running Late brings together a selection of work from a lifetime of writing poetry. These are outstanding, sometimes startlingly good poems, unusually well-crafted without being in any way showy. Unusual too in being so readable.

Reed’s is a remarkable talent, and this collection will speak to many people for its warmth, quiet seriousness and clear-eyed but lyrical observation.

‘A copious gathering in of good work over many years. At the heart of it is a very close attentiveness to fellow human beings, the lives they fashion, how lucky or unlucky they are or become. They are characters, and the writer, the fellow human, gives them their due. Sometimes the subject is the writer’s childhood self in an old photo, or they are other youngsters in whom he recognizes lives very unlike his own. There’s more, much more, in the whole volume. But what touched me most was the joy and the pity of the given ways of being.’ – David Constantine

Published November 2026