Peter Reading

Peter Reading (born July 27, 1946 in Liverpool ; † November 17, 2011 ) was a British poet who was awarded the Cholmondeley Award in 1978 and the Whitbread Bood Award in 1986 and was considered one of the most subtle poets of his generation after Ted Hughes , who was called "Laureate of Grot", a poet of filth and anger, because of his dark, pessimistic poems.

Life

After attending Alsop High School , Reading studied painting at Liverpool College of Art and then worked briefly as a teacher and lecturer in art history . He then worked from 1970 to 1992 as an operator of a weighbridge at a feed mill in Shropshire , an occupation that he said gave him room to think.

His first own collection of poems, For the Municipality's Elderly , was published in 1974. In the following years he wrote numerous other volumes of poetry until one day he was fired as a weighing operator after he refused to wear a uniform. After that he lived as best he could from his writing, published by Bloodaxe Books. In addition, one to two three- or four-line poems appeared annually in The Times Literary Supplement as well as at times longer works on the BBC's third radio program .

Alongside Ted Hughes, he was regarded by literary critics as one of the best poets of his generation, who dealt with his great subjects in small poems without the faintest hint of anointing. He was a master of anger with a flair for tone whose world weariness was well done. In 1978 he was awarded the Cholmondeley Award.

His key book was C (1984), which contained 100 poems, each 100 words long, about a man dying of cancer . These are told from the point of view of the patient who appears to be Reading, but also features an older, learned man who has been caught by life. The order of the poems is formally inventive and fearlessly graphic, but also grimly comical. For Stet (1986) he was honored with the Whitbread Book Award for Poetry.

In the last twenty years of his life he wrote as if he and the world of his poems were already dead. The preoccupation with his own death started early and repeated this over and over again in his poems and he wrote about the earth like an archaeologist about the Anthropocene , filtering out the junk we made out of our planet. Last Poems was published in 1994, followed by nine more poetry collections, book after book filled with heaps of epitaphs full of anger and wine. His poems were often made up of broken, but hard-wired, neo-classical metrics that hinted at fragments of lost works by Horace , Catullus or Properz , but also news from tabloids, the anti- bucolic aspect of small-town life in Shropshire, scientific discoveries, fossil remains , Diseases and extinction.

His other publications included Ob. (1999), which appeared with a death mask Readings on the book cover . The Bloodaxe Verlag published Collected Poems in 2003 , followed by the volumes of poetry −273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). All of the volumes were narrow in size, but haunting and progressive Reading sank into personal oblivion with the increasing pull of human-made global destruction.

He was the only British poet to receive the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry from the US Lannan Foundation twice in 1990 and 2004 . Reading was also the only poet to date who read his entire life's work of 26 published poetry collections for an archive filmed by the Lannan Foundation .

Publications

• 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
• C , 1984
• Ukulele music , 1985
• Book I, Ukulele music; Book II, Going on , 1985
• Essential Reading , 1986
• Stet , 1986
• Final Demands , 1988
• Perduta Gente , 1989
• Evagatory , 1992
• Ukulele Music and Perduta Gente , 1994
• Last poems , 1994
• Collected Poems , 1995
• Collected Poems 1 , 1996
• Peter Reading , 1997
• Work in regress , 1997
• Apophthegmatic , 1999
• Ob , 1999
• Marfan , 2000
• [Untitled] , 2001
• Faunal , 2002
• −273.15 , 2006

Background literature

• Isabel Martin: The work of Peter Reading (1970-1994): Interpretation and documentation . Dissertation , Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel 1994, ISBN 3-8253-0337-3 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Reading in the catalog of the German National Library
• Peter Reading obituary: Poet whose bleak, pessimistic works led him to be called the laureate of grot . In: The Guardian (December 2, 2011)
• openlibrary.org