As a relatively fierce winter finally dissolves into spring, Peter Reading's clear-eyed and unsentimental poem acts as an indirect reminder that the drama of media headlines overstate the vast majority of the population's vulnerability to the season's excesses. In Britain, we are not good at dealing with snow.

Reading's satirical feel for inconsistency, for irony, and for scandalous iniquity, is aimed, instead at those who are obliged, by circumstance or choice, to endure freezing conditions alfresco.

The award-winning poet's own life was an object lesson in non-conformity. Born in Liverpool, this sometime teacher and instinctive itinerant dropped out to become a weighbridge operator in Shropshire for several decades, an occupation which allowed him time to think and to compose poems.

Forging an entirely novel poetic approach, Reading is untrammelled by 'agenda'; he makes no allowance for propriety or taste, and tells it how he sees it. His poems are engaged, visceral, and astonishingly sensitive to the smell of hypocrisy. Where they do not wear a faux aura of misanthropy, they convey a brutal, for some unpalatable, honesty. His Pandora's Box of themes covers every arc of the human condition, and the absolute openness of his vision seems to demand a prosaic, formless style of presentation, where untitled poems commonly fall under generic volume headings.

Perduta Gente is one such. A rough Italian epithet for 'lost people', nowhere is this 1989 collection's titular meaning more apposite than here. A simple observation of a homeless person who is rendered anonymous by the deliberate non-identification of gender, the poem's 'punch' lies in the juxtaposition of physical hardship and the suggestion of great wealth. The vagrant's necrotic decline is ironised by the documented withdrawal of state provision for 'parasites', and by the advert for an expensive London flat, where, needless to add, this 'parasite' will never live.


From Perduta Gente by Peter Reading

Newspaper, wrapped round the torso between the
           fourth and fifth jerseys
(night attire proper for doing a skipper in
           icy December
     under the Festival Hall),
carries a note to the Editor, from 'Ex-
           Soldier' of Telford,
     outlining plans to withdraw
     DHSS cash from those
     no-fixed-abode parasites.

Wound round a varicose indigo swollen
             leg, between second
     and third pair of trousers (which stink -
     urine and faeces and sick),
Property Pages delineate bijou
          River-View Flatlets
     £600,000 each.


Reading's simple, brutal use of language - the stink and detritus of physical and mental erosion - reinforces the poem's continuing relevance. If the context of the London of 1989 has changed - the bijou flatlet would come in at a little more than £600,000 these days - the circumstances of homelessness have changed with it: Reading, who died in 2011, would now have to bear witness to very many more wraiths living on the streets.