About the Author:
Peter Reading won the lannan Literary Award for poetry in 1990. His first 18collections are published in hardback and paperback in his two volume collected poems:poems 1970-1984(1995) and poems 1985-1996 (1996). All his poetry is published by bloodaxe including work in regress (1997) whic was short listed for the T.S Eliot Prrize , Ob. (1999) and Marfan (2000), along with Isabel Martin's critical study Reading peter Reading (2000)
From Booklist:
A commentator has likened Reading's late work (this is his twenty-second collection) to Samuel Beckett's: pared to the bone, angry, and despondent. It is also experimental and traditional. Reading employs the manners and the matter of some of the oldest poetry--Homer, Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, Roman epitaphs, an antique Spanish stanza with a "broken" foot (one fewer syllable in the last line), apothegms--to rail against decay and death; that is the traditional. The experimental comes in constructing the poem "Repetitious" out of lines from earlier poems; repeating particular lines in different contexts throughout the book; making collages out of photographed graffiti, typescripts of parts of other poems in the book, and facsimiles of tombstone inscriptions; "effacing" parts of a poem, giving the letters a weathered, faded look; and having the poem in broken-foot stanzas typographically topple over as it concludes. A bigger experiment is Reading's recasting of a literal English translation of a Kafkaesque Armenian poem, "Alert!" Have no fear, however; for all its traditionalism and experimentation, this is powerful, elemental poetry. Ray Olson
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