Ob

After mapping national decline and world destruction over thirty years through twenty books, the ever-narrowing line of Peter Reading’s own art seems destined to embrace the same fate. From Perduta Gente (1989), his journey down the Styx took him through Evagatory (1992) before the possibly false ending of Last Poems (1994); then on through Eschatological (1996) to Work in Regress (1997), and now culminating in his own death statement, Ob. (1998). Here his own 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 obiit (he died).