Collected Poems: 3: Poems 1997-2003

by Peter Reading

Peter Reading has been one of Britain's most original and controversial angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking-as funny as he is disconcerting. Skillful and technically inventive, he mixes 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, ignorance, political ineptness, and cultural impoverishment. This third volume of his Collected Poems includes the complete texts of Work in Regress, Ob., Marfan, [untitled], and Faunal, as well as a new long poem, Civil, and a new collection. Peter Reading won the inaugural Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1990, and held the first Lannan Foundation Literary Residency in 1998-1999. The first two volumes of the Collected Poems are also available.

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Peter Reading (27 July 1946 – 17 November 2011) was an English poet and the author of 26 collections of poetry. He is known for his choice of ugly subject matter, and use of classical metres. The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry describes his verse as "strongly anti-romantic, disenchanted and usually satirical". Interviewed by Robert Potts, he described his work as a combination of "painstaking care" and "misanthropy".