Untitled - Softcover

Reading, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852245530 ISBN 13: 9781852245535

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2002

Synopsis

Includes poems, which can challenge the notion that anything can be definitive. It is a fitting non-title for reading the collection, which confronts the inadequacy of language in the face of the death and decline, of man's unspeakable inhumanity and his brutal destruction of the planet.

About this title

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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About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1852245530
• ISBN 13: 9781852245535
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 62