Peter Reading was one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heartbreaking – as funny as he was disconcerting. Over four decades he became our most skilful and technically inventive poet, 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, phony media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can now be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems. This was published in three volumes from Bloodaxe: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and Poems 1997-2003 (2003). He subsequently produced two later collections, -273.15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010). He died in 2011.
Volume 2 of his Collected Poems includes an index for the first two volumes. The collections included (in full) are: Ukulele Music (1985), Going On (1985), Stet (1986), Final Demands (1988), Perduta Gente (1989), Shitheads (1989), Evagatory (1992) and Last Poems (1994).
- ISBN13 9781852243562
- Publish Date 27 June 1996
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 October 2006
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 320
- Language English