Description
Book SynopsisAfter mapping Britain's national decline over thirty years through 25 books of poetry, Peter Reading reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st-century work. The vitriolic social critic became poetry's Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world's wildlife and environment. "Vendange Tardive" is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life. Peter Reading is probably the most skilful and technically inventive poet writing today, 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, phoney media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment.
Trade Review'Anger is a country Peter Reading has been colonising for years - the anger is expressed with classical clarity - Rage against the state of the nation, but also rage against the darkness of death, exile and inability to show love' - Helen Dunmore, Observer. 'Despair, both environmental and political, is never absent; but this is an appreciative, defiantly humane volume' - Robert Potts, Guardian. 'Deliberately squalid, violent and apocalyptic contemporary contents are yoked to forms that for the best part of three millennia have been used for the beautiful and the heroic' - Michael Hofmann, The Times.
