Collected Poems: 1: Poems 1970-1984

by Peter Reading

Peter Reading was one of the most original and controversial British poets of the post-war angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. He was a prodigiously skilful and technically inventive poet, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011. Volume 1 of his Collected Poems includes an Introduction by Isabel Martin and was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. The collections included (in full) Water and Waste (1970), For the Municipality’s Elderly (1974), The Prison Cell & Barrel Mystery (1976), Nothing For Anyone (1977), Fiction (1979), Tom o' Bedlam’s Beauties (1981), Diplopic (1983), 5x5x5x5x5 (1983) and C (1984).

Genres: Poetry

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Peter Reading (27 July 1946 – 17 November 2011) was an English poet and the author of 26 collections of poetry. He is known for his choice of ugly subject matter, and use of classical metres. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry describes his verse as "strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical". Interviewed by Robert Potts, he described his work as a combination of "painstaking care" and "misanthropy".

Reviews

[Theo Austin-Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

So C is still the standout here by a country mile, it is so absurdly brilliant in every facet and boggles the mind in its courage to write the desperation one faces when dying, with all its faux heroism and attendant romanticism (that finally, on the death bed, one will say something profound — rather than, “I’m going to be sick”) intermixed with so much comedy and dry wit and abject (since real, not fantasised) horror.

The collection of poems just prior, Diplopia, seeds the blossoming of the greater effects in C, where the introduction of the geologist, who bears the flattening realisation that the material geological earth’s incomprehensible duration, its inanimate self-satiety, renders the Holocene inconsequential and therefore makes man not even interesting enough to be an aberration, produces a baffling macro vision of all of the tragic events which transpire in each and every poem. Regarding Diplopia, it must be said to also give a strange ethical tilt to the whole thing, especially regarding its abundant violence, where an 87 year old woman is methodically raped, beaten and murdered in graphic detail. Isabel Martin’s Reading Peter Reading gives a great perspective regarding critics on this point, and the indirect humanism, as well as the epigrams prior to the poem, certainly complicate the picture (where Reading never gives a stable or honest footing for the writer himself, always saying how he writes for some Other power, but is still a vulture who prizes apart corpses, sharpens his canine tooth, is forced to express the decay eminent in the late twentieth century without ecstasy nor twee censorship).

Tom O’Bedlam’s Beauties quixotic tour through disintegrating rationality is also worth a visit, and won the man the Lannan Foundation prize and an interview with Silverblatt and Hitchens that I am yet to track down. It’s certainly lighter than the two sets mentioned previously, but with Reading’s abyssal carnivalesque style that’s hardly saying much.

Frankly, aside from 5x5x5x5x5, the rest of this first volume has faded in my memory into a strange morose sludge, but I think I’ll be turning back to the For the Municipality’s Elderly to remind myself what a more Auden-Larkin inflected Reading looks like. Also, when reading Reading (haha) prepare a piece of paper and write all of the various wines he mentions, I’m certain there’s some puzzle in there to be solved when the whole list has been amassed.

[Tim Genetti · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good a little on the sad side surely. I went to the web site where he read his oeuvre, never really changes much. I would say that he is a structurally sound poet with a good voice, not totally sardonic. Fun read if your feeling melancholy.