Nine years of formal marriage (not to mention
the practice run at College), to be candid,
are not devoid of some domestic tension –
‘Why can’t you do bread sauce with cloves, like Gran did?’,
‘Who left the frigging bedroom light on all day?’,
or, the real nitty-gritty, ‘I regret
having had you back when you’d had it away
with that bitch!’ – as in most ménages. And yet,
in nine years, they have got acclimatised
to privacies too blushful to admit
even to close friends (who’d be scandalised
by, for example, their bad taste in Lit. –
like actually reading H G Wells);
in short, neither could stand anyone else.
Peter Reading (1946–2011) was a poet whose work covers a wide range of styles and structures. Some of his poems use a layout on the page, such as an exchange of letters, that makes them more like a mini-drama or a short story. One might see him as operating in similar territory to the experimental 1960s novelist B S Johnson. He was also very adept at producing modernised versions of traditional forms, such as sonnets and ballads. The poem above is a good example of that and is taken from his 1977 collection, Nothing for Anyone.
Whatever the form, the tone is often satirical and laugh-out-loud funny, rather similar to Philip Larkin or John Cooper Clarke. On the other hand, he can be far darker than either of them, as in the sequence C (which is short for cancer).
Reading gave up life as an art teacher to concentrate on poetry. To support himself, he worked in an agricultural feed plant, the sort of manual work that he hoped would leave his mind clear to concentrate on his writing. Perhaps unintentionally, the lives of his fellow workers provided him with a rich source of material.
n some of his finest poems, he reproduces the rural dialect and attitude to life in a way that is completely unpatronising. I think this might be some of the best writing about work outside Charles Bukowski’s novel Post Office.
The Good Reader 