About this site

(For contact send a mail to "webmaster" at this domain)

As you may have suspected, the author of these pages is not entirely unrelated to the poet to whom they are dedicated. Fred Reid married the sister of my father which makes me his nephew - I think.

I am just an occasional reader of poetry, much less a native speaker of the English language. But there is this uncle and his wife whom I have had the pleasure to visit several times despite the distance of roughly 5600 miles. Not surprisingly, but rather late I discovered Fred's poetry, the abundance of which I only gradually realized.

Of course, my brothers and I - as children - were regularly stunned by the christmas and birthday cards that arrived from that distant and - as we imagined - almost 'extraterrestial' city with the red bridge and the fog. And we grew quite suspicious every time we admired those little poems and greetings in perfect calligraphy, and were told that "uncle Fred did this by hand" (see Calligraphy).

As a student I began to take advantage of the aunts and uncles living in the United States by travelling there and straining their hospitality. Only then did I discover the pleasure of having excellent, hour-long conversations with Beate and Fred, and having the poet read his work to us.

So when the big birthday event of January 22nd in 2004 approached I decided to gather what little I know about web authoring and set up these pages to spread the word and to honor Frederick W. Reid for his life and work. And here you are, reading them ...

Josua Dietze, Mainz, Germany