Poetry Book Society Recommendation "His harsh, violent verses have come to terms with life in contemporary Britain in the front line. They are clever, witty, inventive, slangy, funny and serious...You come looking for a poet, and he does not disappoint". -- The Times. For twenty-five years Peter Reading has been one of Britain's most original and controversial poets: angry, uncompromising, gruesomely ironic, hilarious and heart-breaking -- as funny as he is disconcerting. He is probably the most skillful and technically inventive poet writing today, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter...

England's unofficial laureate mixes the matter and speech of the gutter in his angry, why-are-we-here- poems, but he uses meter for the jobPeter Reading's poems from twenty-five years and eighteen books have been published in two volumes, the first, Poems 1970-1974, in 1995 - A poetry of foul moods. But it is also a poetry that insists on angry intelligence over world-weary head-shaking. -- Publishers Weekly. For a poet to be collected like this, at the age of fifty in mid-career, is unusual, but not for Reading -- prolific, distinctive and controversial. His is an epic lament for a species...