Laurie Smith reviews Marfan by Peter Reading (Bloodaxe) and Reading Peter Reading by Isobel Martin (Bloodaxe).
It seems that no-one quite knows what to make of Peter Reading. He has been compared to Swift, Dickens and John Clare, writers so different as to make the comparisons suspect. Sean O’Brien has bizarrely described him as a Thatcherite poet and he has reduced Simon Armitage to helpless tautology: “Because he is unique, he is also without comparison and therefore without equal”. Yet Armitage, for all his clumsiness, is right. Reading is unlike any previous poet in English and his work says something fundamental about the limits of poetry.
Marfan is his 21st book in 30 years, an extraordinary rate of productivity comparable to those of Tennyson and Hardy. Bloodaxe has republished all but the most recent in a two-volume Collected Poems and has accompanied it with the first full-length critical study of Reading’s work, Isabel Martin’s Reading Peter Reading. This details the unique trajectory of Reading’s life – a 1st class Art degree; withdrawal from teaching to work in rural Shropshire for 22 years as a labourer in an animal feed mill; his dismissal in 1992 for refusing to wear the new multinational company’s uniform; and his receipt of the United States’ most valuable poetry award with subsequent reading tours, a year-long literary residency (when Marfan was written) and a further two-year grant awarded this year.
Isabel Martin gives a full account of reviewers’ responses to each of Reading’s books. Her own comments on his work, while direct and non-adulatory, are excellent on Reading’s technical achievements, less so on the wider implications of his work. This may not be her fault in that the original book, based on her doctoral thesis, had to be “bloodaxed” by a hundred pages and she may have decided to keep the factual rather than the speculative. At a factual level, this will be the essential source book for any future discussion of Reading’s work.
It also has a cover illustration of a sand head cast of Peter Reading which looks very much like Blake’s death mask. Unintentionally it supports the view that Reading has already died as a poet and is kept alive posthumously by American grants.
Until the 1990s, Reading’s work was notable for the constriction of its interests and the originality of its means. Its interests were suffering, death, existential isolation and a clear-eyed contempt for human beliefs in the face of contingency and the vastness of geological time. He pursued those interests without sentimentality, warmth or (though reviewers searched anxiously for it) much humour. He did not attempt philosophy nor did he generally use imagery; his characteristic mode was direct utterance. But his work, though bleak, was not bare. He used a vast range of verse forms (several invented by himself), an exceptional range of language – demotic, scientific and historical – and numerous typographical effects. Since Tom O’Bedlams’s Beauties (1981), his books had been through-composed to create total works of great subtlety.
Three poems from Diplopic (1983) will give a brief indication of his range. In his most famous individual poem, 15 February, the voice of the disappointed lover whose expensive Valentine’s card has been torn up is rendered with total originality:
I sort of stuffed and tore her sort of scarlet
I sort of stuffed her, like, and felt her sort of satin.
I sort of felt she’d tore out all me stuffing.
I felt her stuff like satin sort of scarlet
her stuff felt sore, torn satin whorlet scar
I liked her score felt stiffed her scar lick hurt
I tore her satin felt her stuffed her scarlet
tore out her heart stuff scarred her Satan har…
This poem gives me the sense of entering the mind of an incoherent sex murderer more clearly than any other writing that I know.
In Telecommunication, a sonnet about one’s mother’s death, the horror is offset by deliberately awful rhymes (Suzuki/pukey, Jerez/death), the brusque turning away from feeling:
The feeling scared/exhilarated/numb. Sad
memories of – (enough of all that shite)
and the concluding words to the five year old which are mordant beyond irony:
‘Yes, Grandma’s bones might fossilise, of course,
like those in your First Book of Dinosaurs.’
Finally, in At Home, some skinheads torture an old lady to death for £1.70 and set fire to her cage bird which dies whispering “hello sailor”. The description of it ends:
slowly, nictitating membranes
squeeze across dull-bloomed sclerotics.
One can see the attraction to Reading of presenting the utmost violence with the utmost scientific detachment, but there is an astute poetic mind at work here, creating sonorous elegance and a density of suggestion. In “nictitating”, the scientific word for the closing of a bird’s third eye membrane, there are overtones of nicotine (the bird was burnt with a cigarette lighter) and perhaps micturating, the squeezing out of fluid. The eyeballs “bloom”, if dully, in their agony and “sclerotics” suggests the eyeballs hardening.
Faced with such dedication to the rendering of suffering, it is not surprising that reviewers seek refuge in far-fetched comparisons. Given his training as an artist and the frequent mention of artists in interviews with him, one would have thought that the parallels between Reading’s poetry and visual art would have been explored more fully. For me, the most illuminating comments about Reading are in John Berger’s essay about Francis Bacon in About Looking. Berger’s description of Bacon applies equally to Reading: the bleakness of vision, the consistency with which the vision is articulated over a long period, the great formal skill. Berger argues, I think conclusively, that Bacon’s art is centrally concerned with mindlessness:
Bacon is the opposite of an apocalyptic painter who envisages the worst is likely. For Bacon, the worst has already happened. The worst that has happened has nothing to do with the blood, the stains, the viscera. The worst is that man has come to be seen as mindless.
What Bacon’s pictures do, Berger concludes, “is to demonstrate how alienation may provoke a longing for its own absolute form – which is mindlessness”.
These comments apply equally to Reading’s poetry, at least until Perduta Gente (1989). They are important because they are the first attempt in English to render in poetry a process begun by the expressionist painters and now chiefly dominant in pulp fiction, popular cinema and video – the reduction of people, without wit or satire, to mindless creatures driven by lust, vengeance or terror. To achieve this in serious poetry, a medium which resists simplicity of effect, is a measure of Reading’s dedication and skill.
Until now. Throughout the 1990s, much of Reading’s work has consisted of adaptations of other writers and reworkings of earlier poems of his own. Isabel Martin is frank about this and describes it as Reading’s “slow farewell”. His 1994 volume, Last Poems, was indeed a vision of his literary death – a collection of poems edited by ‘John Bilston’ after the poet’s suicide, But of the twenty-three poems, only five were new.
Marfan represents a continuing decline. It was written during Reading’s stay in 1998/99 as Lannan Foundation Literary Resident at Marfa, a small town in Southern Texas. Reading calls the post a sinecure and there is no mention in the book of his talking about literature to anyone. The book is a collage – Reading’s favourite art form – consisting of fragments about the town, its history and surroundings:
A lone vexed longhorn bull, malevolent,
rattles the rotting tied-together rails
round the corral, built about 1920
by the Galveston, Harrisburg & San Anton’
Rail Company. These defunct stockpens served
a central shipping point for animals raised
in Brewster, Presidio and Jeff Davis Counties.
This is the style and tone, flat and factual, of much of the book. There are monologues by local residents and quotations from Perduta Gente, Hawthorne and the Big Bend Sentinel, the local newspaper. There are also numerous jottings, one to five lines in length, of which these three are adjacent and typical:
I blow the Chihuahuan dust from his Collected.
Ewart is three-years-dead; this is the desert.A roadside Turkey Vulture scrutinises
the hesitant progress of a passer-by.The First Episcopal Church of Holy Shit
clanks its complacent bell across the basin.
The only signs of the earlier seriously existential Reading are the monologues by a paranoid local who believes that the mysterious night flickers in the desert are encrypted messages sent by the CIA, and the gentle rhyming description of the Mexican cemetery with which the book ends.
Reading’s decline is from being a great and terrible original writer, the literary equivalent of Francis Bacon, to being the equivalent of Damien Hirst or Tracey Emin: a postmodernist who claims that by displaying objects from the real world – a stuffed shark, a bit of Texas history, a crumpled bed, a quotation from the Big Bend Sentinel – they become works of art. They don’t, of course, and when fashions change Hirst’s and Emin’s fame will be seen as laughable.
From one viewpoint, Reading has achieved a paradisal afterlife – financial security through an American sponsor and a publisher committed to publishing everything he writes. From another, it is the life-in-death of once admired poets like (to keep to the safely dead) Siegfried Sassoon and George Barker: each successive collection duly published by the indulgent publisher, decreasingly reviewed and almost wholly unread. If he cannot regain or renew his vision, Reading would do better to turn his attention to other things.
