[untitled]

[untitled] is a fitting non-title for Peter Reading’s latest collection, which confronts the inadequacy of language in the face of death and decline, of man’s unspeakable inhumanity and his brutal destruction of the planet. These grimly ironic poems are pared down to the bones of language, their meaning often decayed to half-life, words corrupted beyond sense. 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 patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of contemporary lives. [untitled] is as much a tour de force as his two dozen previous books, weaving together interlinked poems and sequences which echo with his earlier work as well as with the earliest poetry, with Homer and Anglo-Saxon poems of exile. Alert! is Reading’s version of a long poem of alienation by the exiled Armenian existentialist Vahé Oshagan. The haiku, tankas and fragments of Apophthegmatic (‘pithy sayings’) improvise on oriental metrics to ponder life’s brevity and imminent death. His adaptation of an old Spanish stanza in Copla a Pie Quebrado is a corrupted form, a metric which enacts his meaning, ‘the final foot broken – / fitting for History fractured / in an aridified dump.’ Repetitious is a reprise in iambic stanzas recalling lines from Reading’s thirty-year output.