Work in Regress - Softcover

Just a few years ago, Readings Collected Poems appeared in two massive volumes, spanning 25 years of writing, and demonstrating his remarkable range of styles and his unrelenting vision of an England in decay. Theres nothing beyond Readings ken, and there seems to be no form he wont give a shot, as he continues to do in this little volume that also rubs our faces in the squalor of post-Thatcherism, for these desperate circumstances demand disparate measures. A BBC performance piece, Three, contributes to Readings self-mythology, as he provides a litany of the dead and his relation to them in time; his witty self-deprecation finds his voice literally shrinking and fading from the pagethe only visual gimmick in a book that relies on a textbooks worth of formal jokes and meters, and also on the plain solace of Word-Hoard. Contrarian to the core, Readings also angry, boastful, drunk, suicidal, dismissive, and willing to mine any source, to re-imagine the works of the past in service of his timely invective. He scours the classics for the naughtiest bits, from Theocritus and Propertius to Horace and Ovid, and even translates the guttural verses of Piers the Plowman, with its luridly detailed depiction of the Deadly Sin, Gluttony. Readings direct speech always engageseven his agitprop relies on quick wit and his delightful Anglo-Saxon vulgarity. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.