Vendange Tardive

Häftad, Engelska, 2010

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After mapping Britain's national decline over thirty years through 25 books of poetry, Peter Reading reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st-century work. The vitriolic social critic became poetry's Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world's wildlife and environment. "Vendange Tardive" is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life. Peter Reading is probably the most skilful 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, phoney media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2010-11-01
Mått138 x 216 x 5 mm
Vikt102 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
Antal sidor56
FörlagBloodaxe Books Ltd
ISBN9781852248840

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Peter Reading (1946-2011) was born in Liverpool. After studying painting at Liverpool College of Art, he worked as a schoolteacher in Liverpool (1967-68) and at Liverpool College of Art, where he taught Art History (1968-70). He then worked for 22 years as a weighbridge operator at an animal feedmill in Shropshire, a job which left him free to think, until he was sacked for refusing to wear a uniform introduced by new owners of the business. His only break was a two-year residency at Sunderland Polytechnic (1981-83). After leaving Liverpool, he lived for 40 years in various parts of Shropshire, in recent years in Ludlow. The benevolence of America’s Lannan Foundation rescued him from poverty. He was the first writer to hold the one-year Lannan writing residency in Marfa, Texas (in 1999), and is the only British poet to have won the Lannan Award for Poetry twice, in 1990 and 2004, as well as the only poet to read an entire life’s work for the Lannan Foundation’s DVD archive – his filmed readings for Lannan (made in 2001 and 2010) of 26 poetry collections make up the only archive of its kind. His other honours included the Cholmondeley Award, the Dylan Thomas Award for Diplopic (1983), and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry for Stet (1986). Work in Regress was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997. All his poetry is published by Bloodaxe Books, along with Isabel Martin’s critical study Reading Peter Reading (2000). His first collection was Water and Waste (1970), published when he was 24, and his last, 26th collection, was Vendange Tardive, published forty years later in 2010. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems, published in three volumes: 1: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), 2: Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and 3: Poems 1997-2003 (2003). His later collections from Bloodaxe are -273-15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010).

'Anger is a country Peter Reading has been colonising for years - the anger is expressed with classical clarity - Rage against the state of the nation, but also rage against the darkness of death, exile and inability to show love' - Helen Dunmore, Observer. 'Despair, both environmental and political, is never absent; but this is an appreciative, defiantly humane volume' - Robert Potts, Guardian. 'Deliberately squalid, violent and apocalyptic contemporary contents are yoked to forms that for the best part of three millennia have been used for the beautiful and the heroic' - Michael Hofmann, The Times.