Vendange Tardive

After mapping Britain's national decline over thirty years through 25 books of poetry, Peter Reading has reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st-century work. The vitriolic social critic has become poetry's Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world's wildlife and environment. "Vendange Tardive" is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life. Peter Reading is probably the most skilful and technically inventive poet writing today, mixing the matter and speech of the gutter with highly sophisticated metrical and syllabic patterns to produce scathing and grotesque accounts of lives blighted by greed, meanness, ignorance, phoney media flimflam, political ineptness and cultural impoverishment.