Peter Reading once offered his parents, in a poem, the "dubious distinction of a postdated epitaph" ("Thank you for having been what parents should be/ Benigner than their witless brood deserves"), noting that "memorials are wasted on their victims". In 1996 he composed an equally unsentimental postdated epitaph for himself: "Truculent? Maybe. Yet possessed of virtue/ by being, albeit a shit, not garrulous./ You thought him cruel? No more than you should think/ A turkey vulture cruel – vocations differ".
Reading may not have been garrulous, but he was highly productive, and despite his evident mistrust of sentimentality and memorialisation, his work was consistently elegiac, mourning not only the dear friends he lost, but – postdated again – the entire human species. His vision was bleak from the outset, and through around 30 pamphlets and volumes he wrote about the darkest aspects of existence. His work worried interestingly at the possibility of its futility, flirting with self-destruction or silence while helplessly carrying on.
As an atheist and rationalist who, from his childhood onwards, had been alert to environmental decline, he was rigorous in his expectation of the very worst. At the same time, his work, while cruelly clear-eyed, was not free of compassion, or joy. At 51, he wrote of "three consolations at least: / verse; viticulture; love". To this fancy version of "wine, women and song", one would have to add birdwatching. Reading was a passionate twitcher all his life, and several of his more cheerful poems consist of precise and celebratory descriptions of occasions when he saw a rare bird, often accompanied by precise and celebratory descriptions of what he drank, rare or otherwise, while doing so. The enthusiasm received its fullest treatment in Faunal (2002).
Reading was born in 1946 in Liverpool. His father was an electrical engineer who had spent three years as a PoW of the Japanese in the Second World War. From the age of 12 Reading visited Hilbre on the River Dee, a bird island accessible by foot at low tide from North Kirby, and he and his lifelong friend Michael Donahue would help the warden there. During his teens they camped on Hilbre every weekend during the warmer months, and would also go to other islands twice a year during migration. Donahue was killed in a car accident in the early 1980s and was repeatedly elegised by Reading.
In 1962 Reading studied art at Liverpool College of Art. He largely ignored the fashion for Pop Art, but developed a lasting taste for Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and early abstract and Cubist art. He was also taught liberal studies by Jack Bevan, to whom Reading's first pamphlet of poems was dedicated. Bevan introduced him to Old English and Middle English poetry.
He graduated in 1967 with a first-class degree and taught for a while before moving to Ludlow and taking a job at an animal feed mill. With the exception of a couple of years as a writer-in-residence at Sunderland Polytechnic in the early 1980s, he worked at the mill until 1992, when he was sacked for, characteristically, refusing to wear a corporate uniform. His former employers ("whose subliteracy ensures my safety") would later be mocked, in pastiche-Catullan verse, in a volume entitled Shitheads.
Work at the mill was undemanding, and left Reading with the time and energy to pursue his real interests: poetry and wine. Never interested in schmoozing his way into literary circles, he was fortunate to be picked up early by the poet George MacBeth, another much mourned lifelong friend, who suggested he send his poems to Anthony Thwaite, then editor at Secker and Warburg. First Thwaite, then Mick Imlah at Chatto, and lastly Neil Astley at Bloodaxe, allowed Reading the freedom to produce his unusual and at times unfashionable work. The grim subject matter – disease, madness, social unrest, poverty, environmental catastrophe – was mediated in a magisterial range of traditional verse forms and metres. These time-honoured modes could be (deliberately) inappropriate, as could his dark humour; his work is restlessly ironic and satirical, and often extremely funny. Increasingly he composed book-length poems, artfully cross-referencing his narratives and motifs, adding collages and playing with the typography, constantly asking whether any art was equal to the horrors he described. After his volume Stet won a Whitbread prize in 1986, and his work was championed by poets such as Mick Imlah and Alan Jenkins, both of whom published many of his poems in the Times Literary Supplement, Reading developed a secure reputation, but remained impressively sui generis.
Reading never gave the impression of caring either way about success, unsurprisingly given his belief that there was no posterity to write for. He was strikingly unmaterialistic, and at times lived in penury. Money from grants and prizes would often clear unpaid bills; anything more would purchase better-quality wine. By the end of his life he had few possessions, having stripped his life down to essentials. In the 1970s and 1980s he had lived with his first wife, Diana, and his only child, Angela, in the village of Little Stretton, Shropshire; when they divorced, he gave her their cottage. From the 1990s he lived in Shrewsbury with his second wife, Deborah, in a tempestuous relationship marked by drinking and financial insecurity. Work from this period includes some fine translations of Propertius which reflect these circumstances. Towards the end of his life he met his third wife, Penelope, and lived with her in Ludlow until his death: "Well, we won't live long, we know that; / but while we do, let's love, thus".
Periodic rescue, and the opportunity to travel, came with two grants from the Lannan Foundation, in 1990 and 2004. He travelled to Australia in 1993, and America in 1994; in 1998, he became the first writer to hold a one-year writing Lannan residency in Marfa, Texas. His volume Marfan (2000) is a hilarious, candid and oddly touching account of this experience.
Reading's poetic persona – "badass and not nice to know" – was one which he could ironise, undercut, mock and kill off when it suited him. In reality, Reading could be very much like that persona – obdurate, scathing, cruelly funny, cantankerous, and sometimes alarming when drunk (as he frequently was) – but he was also a warm and generous man, tender in the face of suffering, gentle, wry, fiercely loyal and loving to his friends. The later work is suffused with grief at the loss of those closest to him – especially Donahue, and the poets George MacBeth, Gavin Ewart and Mick Imlah – and with appreciation of his living friends, notably William Johnston, "Fellow-Toper/ Field-Guide-Wielder", to whom Reading felt he owed "my greatest debt", and with whom he went on countless birdwatching trips, and the artist Peter Edwards, who often painted Reading. Bloodaxe published three large volumes of Reading's Collected Poems, each bearing a different portrait of Reading by Edwards. For all his mistrust of posterity, he left behind one of the most inventive and unusual poetic oeuvres of the 20th century.
He is survived by his wife, Penelope, and daughter.
Peter Reading, poet, was born on July 27, 1946. He died on November 17, 2011, aged 65