On the train home I read in the Evening Standard of the passing-away of Peter Reading - no doubt he would grumble to hear himself elegised in such a Tory rag. He was one of the true originals of post-war British poetry, a quietly rebarbative presence doggedly pursuing his own hard-won, hard-edged style in the face of a dominant flaccidity. As the guy in the ES said, his current neglect among poetry-readers is shameful, yet for a writer who has dwelt so obsessively on his own mortality (later volume-titles include Last Poems, Ob and Vendange Tardive ie. late harvest) his death could perhaps not be described as untimely.
