Recorded at the home of Peter Reading in October, 2010.

Peter Reading is one of Britain’s most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious, and heartbreaking. In Spring 2001, the Lannan Foundation traveled to England and recorded Peter Reading reading his entire body of poetry to that time, i.e. through the collection Faunal. In 2010 the Lannan Foundation commissioned British videographer Pamela Robertson-Pearce to record Mr. Reading reading from his subsequent collections at his home in Ludlow, Shropshire, England. The Lannan Foundation is delighted to bring the voice and work of Peter Reading to a world-wide audience.

Reading’s death statement features his ‘death mask on the cover. His own consolations of ‘verse, viticulture and love’ are mirrored in the extended swansong of Chinoiserie, a sequence of versions of the 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po, while the blunter associations of his title are encrypted in the book’s progressively shorter lyrics: obsolete, obscene and obit (he died). Now out of print, this book is included in Collected Poems Volume III: Poems 1997-2003 (2003, Bloodaxe).

You may learn more about this event on the Lannan website.