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Perduta Gente
- GenresPoetry
Paperback
Published January 1, 1989
About the author
Peter Reading
47 books4 followersPeter 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".
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 6, 2017
Why read a novel, when you can read Reading?
June 27, 2019
This collage of documents relating to the destitute is typical of Reading and reads now as an 80s period piece--but then one asks, 'are there still dossers, still homeless people, under the Royal Festival Hall?' and doesn't know ... the dossers must still be somewhere; and, if they've been moved on, can have been moved on only for cosmetic reasons. In the sense, depictions of poverty are maybe always period pieces for those who are not poor.
The central conceit here, and a bit of a shaggy dog story--though not less impassioned or politically acute for that--is that one of Reading's down-and-outs is a middle-class former nuclear power station-worker sacked for exposing a leak to the papers. The ravages of contamination to radioactive waste are compared to the physical indignities of homelessness--the sick, the squits, Mucky Preece's boiled-up rat and thrown-away rotten stall vegetables and their effect on the gut. The dossers boil down boot polish and smear it on a side of white donated by nuns. Reading's range of tones and registers is wider than initially signalled. He quotes Beowulf and the Book of Lamentations to bewail a loss of health--though we do not see his beggars healthy, only wretchedly and rollickingly indigent (pissing in a nun's face, bedding down with Strongbow on obscene riverside flat property ads). His descriptions, exact, emphatic and with no quarter given, initially take the form of noun-phrases, but there are also more elaborated verbal descriptions, though not often of actions taken by the homeless. The book has a careful fugue-like structure in its repetitions and patternings of phrase--'owners of nothing'; 'those having precognition suffer/sorrow beforehand'--amounting to what feels an intellectually, as well as an emotionally, comprehensive experience.
The central conceit here, and a bit of a shaggy dog story--though not less impassioned or politically acute for that--is that one of Reading's down-and-outs is a middle-class former nuclear power station-worker sacked for exposing a leak to the papers. The ravages of contamination to radioactive waste are compared to the physical indignities of homelessness--the sick, the squits, Mucky Preece's boiled-up rat and thrown-away rotten stall vegetables and their effect on the gut. The dossers boil down boot polish and smear it on a side of white donated by nuns. Reading's range of tones and registers is wider than initially signalled. He quotes Beowulf and the Book of Lamentations to bewail a loss of health--though we do not see his beggars healthy, only wretchedly and rollickingly indigent (pissing in a nun's face, bedding down with Strongbow on obscene riverside flat property ads). His descriptions, exact, emphatic and with no quarter given, initially take the form of noun-phrases, but there are also more elaborated verbal descriptions, though not often of actions taken by the homeless. The book has a careful fugue-like structure in its repetitions and patternings of phrase--'owners of nothing'; 'those having precognition suffer/sorrow beforehand'--amounting to what feels an intellectually, as well as an emotionally, comprehensive experience.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews