Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Peter Reading must be, by a long chalk, the most prolific serious poet writing today and the astonishing thing is that, while he sustains his extraordinary rate of production, the quality of his work, as shown in his latest volume, [untitled], the mastery of craft, linguistic richness and variety, the intelligence, wit and the impressive but unflashy depth and range of his learning, continues to dazzle and delight.

     I could have done without some of the graphic tricks and collages which seem to me slightly pretentious distractions from the real business of the poetry, but most of the poems succeed admirably in their dark purposes. Peter Reading, as anyone who has encountered his work will know, is a notoriously pessimistic observer of, and commentator on, what he sees as the black or bleak human tragi-comedy. In ‘Repetition’ he presents a miniature Odyssey of his own poetic voyages in which echoes of his earlier poems can be heard, and in which his usually unrelentingly dark vision brightens a little in the last line when “The Master kissed Penelope and sang”.

     This vision and its expression in a rich synthesis of high rhetoric and gutter vernacular and a variety of prosodic strategies have been characteristic of Reading’s poetry from the appearance of his brilliantly precocious For The Municipality’s Elderly in 1974, so the author’s persona of sardonic, despairing scepticism and Swiftian “saeva indignatio” has become fixed in the reading public’s perception of the man and his work, and this new collection will do nothing to change it. As the poet himself writes in the fifth of seven poems entitled ‘[untitled]’:

 Shaving mirror. Hmmm.
Known you since you were this high.
 55?, so soon?
Seems like only yesterday
 (of course it was all fields, then)...

Badass and not nice to know -
you have got used to the role.

This is a poetry which does nothing “to harmonize...” in Housman’s words, “... the sadness of the universe”. It asserts and, in a way, celebrates the sheer awfulness of the world we live in, the ugliness, stupidity, cruelty and futility, but there is a paradox here. The vitality, skilfulness, hard-hitting accuracy and, above all, the funniness of much of the verse is exhilarating rather than depressing. In another ‘[untitled]’, Reading gives us his potted version of Dante’s Inferno, ending like this:

Among these violent and these dismal things,
people meandered naked and afraid
with hope of neither exit nor of light.

Out of the filthy slime a figure rose:
‘Who are you that arrives before his hour?’,
then slithered back into the fetid slough.

‘Have we now viewed the full extent of Hell?’
My guide to me: ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet.’

That alone is worth the price of the book.