Ukulele Music

Literature & Fiction

READING, Peter

Poetry

David&Charles

Perduta Gente

Secker

LAST POEMS

History & Criticism

TRAFALGAR SQUARE +

Ukulele Music and Perduta Gente: Perduta Gente

TriQuarterly

This double volume of poems is the first U.S. publication of one of the most important and exciting contemporary English poets. "Ukulele Music" is a narrative of violence that ranges from urban London to Patagonia, and his philosophically serious treatment of victim and witness, culture and event, is unparalleled among contemporary writers. "Perduta Gente" is an intense depiction of the pathos and ironies of urban frenzy, squalor, money, and power, complete with a variety of visual textures--newspaper clippings, handwritten notebook entries, typed memos, and a scientific table.

<p>Poetry Book Society Recommendation "His harsh, violent verses have come to terms with life in contemporary Britain in the front line. They are clever, witty, inventive, slangy, funny and serious...You come looking for a poet, and he does not disappoint". -- The Times. For twenty-five years Peter Reading has been one of Britain's most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heart-breaking -- as funny as he is disconcerting. He is probably the most skillful 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, political ineptness, and cultural impoverishment.</p>

Collected Poems: 1: Poems 1970-1984

Bloodaxe Books

Collected Poems: 2: Poems 1985-1996

England's unofficial laureate mixes the matter and speech of the gutter in his angry, why-are-we-here- poems, but he uses meter for the jobPeter Reading's poems from twenty-five years and eighteen books have been published in two volumes, the first, Poems 1970-1974, in 1995 - "A poetry of foul moods. But it is also a poetry that insists on angry intelligence over world-weary head-shaking". -- Publishers Weekly. For a poet to be collected like this, at the age of fifty in mid-career, is unusual, but not for Reading -- prolific, distinctive and controversial. His is an epic lament for a species given to cruelty and self-destruction. Generally, rhyme provides the backbone for public poetry. What sets Reading apart is his use of mostly classical dactylic meter, with Latin hexameters, couplets, and older Greek forms.

Collected Poems: Poems 1985-1996

Bloodaxe Books Ltd.

<p>England's unofficial laureate mixes the matter and speech of the gutter in his angry, why-are-we-here- poems, but he uses meter for the jobPeter Reading's poems from twenty-five years and eighteen books have been published in two volumes, the first, Poems 1970-1974, in 1995 - A poetry of foul moods. But it is also a poetry that insists on angry intelligence over world-weary head-shaking. -- Publishers Weekly. For a poet to be collected like this, at the age of fifty in mid-career, is unusual, but not for Reading -- prolific, distinctive and controversial. His is an epic lament for a species given to cruelty and self-destruction. Generally, rhyme provides the backbone for public poetry. What sets Reading apart is his use of mostly classical dactylic meter, with Latin hexameters, couplets, and older Greek forms.</p>

Here Peter Reading's consolations of ""verse, viticulture, and love"" are mirrored in the extended swansong of Chinoiserie, a sequence of versions of the eighth-century Chinese poet Li Po, while the blunter associations of his title are encrypted in the book's progressively shorter lyrics: obsolete, obscene, and obit (he died).

Grief, decline and exile have been Peter Reading's persistent themes through twenty books written over thirty years. After staring into death's Medusa face in his recent work, the scourge of Britain's sham uncaring society sentences himself to a year's exile deep in the empty heart of Texas in Marfan. This richly observed, unsparingly caustic book-length poem presents an unflattering but grimly affectionate portrait of the hick town of Marfa (pop. 2,474).Here be cowpokes and Bible bashers, crazies in Chevies, trigger-happy Border Patrolmen and gabby old-timers in Ray's Bar, all intent on bending Reading's ear. And he takes it all in, just as the slaughtered Indians and despised 'Spiks' have done, but this suspicious stranger answers back. In blackly ironic, highly sophisticated poetry created in their own language, out of their own drawling mouths, Reading's rednecks damn themselves in this latter-day divine comedy set in an arid all-American wasteland.

Marfan

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Books by READING, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by READING, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Ukulele Music

Perduta Gente

LAST POEMS

Ukulele Music and Perduta Gente: Perduta Gente

Ukulele Music and Perduta Gente: Perduta Gente

Collected Poems: 1: Poems 1970-1984

Collected Poems: Poems 1985-1996

Collected Poems: 2: Poems 1985-1996

Ob

Marfan