-273.15 - Peter Reading

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 bitter social critic became poetry's Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world's wildlife and environment. -273.15 [absolute zero] was his first new collection since his three-volume Collected Poems. The book is a lament, a tirade, a disaster warning, and an anthropologist's catalogue of our final expedition addressed to an earlier survivor of global catastrophe, Noah of the Flood. He published his final collection, Vendange Tardive, in 2010.

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).

Despair, both environmental and political, is never absent; but this is an appreciative, defiantly humane volume.
Guardian - Robert Potts