Controversial poet is a bit of an oxymoron, some might say, but Peter Reading, 51 this year, has often been described as controversial. Then again, for years he was supposedly unjustly overlooked, so it’s not entirely clear who was engaged in this controversy. But after 25 years of writing, he has the honour of a collected poems behind him, a best-selling anthology, and two volumes published this month, so he’s certainly shrugged off the label of neglect. The consensus is that Reading is one of the most important poets of his generation.
How does the fame of being “a major poet” strike him? “Well, it’s nothing that I consider to be earth-shaking. Plenty of people still loathe and despise the old lad.”
Indeed, plenty of people always have. One of his earliest reviewers compared him to Dickens’s “fat boy who likes to makes your flesh creep”. Editors have received letters of outrage about his work and even a Jiffy bag of human excrement after he was accused of anti-Semitism. Most recently, Sean O’Brien lambasted him in the Printer’s Devil under the glorious title “The Poet As Thatcherite”.
The poet as Thatcherite? The man whose work has so offended the sensibilities of the Basildon Bond brigade, whose work Lord Havers has said he wouldn’t want his grandchildren to read? The man whom Tom Paulin called “the unofficial laureate of a decaying Britain”?
Reading annoys people from every political side. Partly, this is because his work, a corpus of obsessive integrity, has treated themes that some do not associate with the gentle art of poesy: cancer, homelessness, global catastrophe. Some see a misanthropy in his apparently clinical approach, not helped by Reading’s own acknowledgment of such views (“You thought him cruel? No more than you should think / a Turkey Vulture cruel – vocations differ”). Others see the presentation of issues as an inherently political act and applaud his impeccably researched volume Perduta Gente, with its detailed and upsetting portrayal of down-and-outs. Both these views are wrong.
Increasingly, Reading’s work has focused more on an epic grandeur in which individuals fade and time-honoured topics such as grief, exile and decline are evoked through versions of Roman, Greek, or Anglo-Saxon verse. Fraser Steel has said: “If he’d lived in the 14th century, Reading would have written a lot about bubonic plague.”
Reading does not desire the unhappiness he portrays, but he is genuinely nihilistic, in a Beckettesque sense. His personal despair, which preceded his decline into poverty and alcoholism, is mapped on to a world that offers few reasons to be cheerful.
When it is mentioned that some people find such despair unpalatable, he responds: “Well, I find it almost unpalatable myself.”
Politically, in fact, he would have been an environmentalist. As a boy he was interested in birds and noticed the growing pollution of the rivers. Later, he fled to Shropshire to escape the claws of commerce and “the end of England”, though he has never unthinkingly sentimentalised Housman country. Even this bolt hole has been corrupted: the co-operative of farmers with which he worked was bought up by a firm that believed in modern management techniques.
Reading’s dismissal for refusing the corporate uniform made him briefly newsworthy (“Poet Pete Protests”).
But Reading has been fatalistic since before Swampy was born. “I did, initially, feel something could be done. I’m very doubtful now. I find it worthy that gestures are made. I have admiration for Greenpeace, but I feel they are too late.” Of the road protesters, he says similarly: “It’s high time something was done about all that.” In a recent reprise of some of his earlier pieces against the car culture, he writes: “Somebody ain’t been listening / you, at the back, sit up / and fucking well pay attention.”
Since he and his first wife divorced, Reading has lived with his current partner, with whom he spent a year in Australia after his sacking. Always fond of fine wine – the poems are larded with appreciative references – he has tended to drink more and more, and starts earlier than many. He has been known to fall off stages at readings. It was in Australia that he and his wife found themselves in a situation not unfamiliar to his dispossessed characters in Perduta Gente: “We happened to fall asleep in a public place and were rather rudely awoken by the police, a man and a woman. They thought we were junkies. This is amusing, given that Debs and I must be almost the only people of our generation who have never taken any drugs of any sort – except for drink, of course. We had to roll our sleeves up so they could look for those – you know, those things they look for. The woman wanted to bash us a bit, but the bloke was very helpful, pointed us in the direction of the nearest pub and said, ‘G’day, cobber’, or whatever it is they say.”
Reading’s latest volumes speak simply of the agonies and consolations of drink. Chinoiserie is a collection of versions of the poetry of Li Po, which ruminate on wine, love, sadness and forgetting. In Reading’s own insistent elegiac rhythms, their resonance is unsettling: a stance such as “What to do / late in life / but sing my songs / and forget?” is offset by “Every day / of the year / I drink / till I slump / Though you / married me / any sot / would do.” His new collection, Work in Regress, refers to the consolations of verse, viticulture and love (“in order of merit”, he remarks sardonically).
And so he keeps writing, with a persistence that is heroically at odds with his terminal outlook, finding inventive means to express his tight poetic vision. So he keeps drinking, and so, though rarely sentimental, he keeps loving.
He has not courted the attention that his work has received. And despite the financial insecurities that deny him the better wines, he is an unflaggingly generous man. However gloomy the work can be, it is at times extremely funny and adept at striking mood through elegiac metre.
One final note, on the subject of consolation. A friend of mine who had seen a relative die after a long illness was reading C, Reading’s notorious volume on cancer (witlessly described by one critic as “no more horrible or interesting than the clinical notes would be”). My friend read the sections dealing with the emotional responses of the bereaved, and wept copiously. It was, she said, the first time she felt her own anger and pain had been recognised, the first time she had cried since the funeral. So, verse, viticulture, love. In order of merit.