PERDUTA GENTE

Peter Reading

Secker & Warburg 1989

ISBN 0 436 40999 2

The eponymous 'lost people' of Peter Reading's new book are the dispossessed — not only the obvious dossers and dipsos, the scabrously portrayed 'expendables, eyesores, winos, unworthies', but also, by extension, all H. sapiens, impotently, disadvantageously manipulated, whose aspirations are 'gagged, dis­regarded, unsought'.

In Perduta Gente Peter Reading has marshalled his various material (poems, miscellaneous torn fragments, biographical extracts, diary entries) for the cacophonous union of two disparate thematic motifs.

A bleak and brilliant poem-sequence about contemporary Britain, Peter Reading's new collection confirms, with great authority, all earlier praise.

Original Publisher's Blurb

One day a lone hag gippo arrived and
    camped on the waste ground
which we traversed on our way to the school bus
    every morning. 

Cumulus breath puffs rose from a pink-nosed
    rope-tethered skewbald.
Winter: a frost fern fronded the iced glass
    caravan window
through which I ventured a peep, but I leapt back
    horribly startled
when the rime cleared and an eye
glared through the hole at my own.
(Filthy she was, matted hair, withered leg and
    stank of excreta.) 

After that, each time we passed it we'd lob a
    rock at the window.
When it was smashed she replaced it with cardboard;
    one of us lit it –
she hobbled round with a pisspot and doused the
    flames -with its contents.
Then she gave up and just left it a gaping
    black fenestration
through which we chucked bits of scrap,
rubbish, a dog turd, a brick.

But when she skedaddled, a stain,
delineating where she'd been,
etiolated and crushed,
blighted that place, and remained. 

---

Now we arrive at the front of the ruin;
    here are there moanings,
shrieks, lamentations and dole,
here is there naught that illumes.
Mucky Preece lives in a pigsty beside the
    derelict L Barn,
tetrous, pediculous, skint,
swilling rough cider and Blue.
Now lie we sullenly here in the black mire -
    this hymn they gurgle,
being unable to speak.
Here they blaspheme Divine Power.
Money no object to buyer of L-shaped
    picturesque old barn
seeking the quiet country life
(two hundred and twenty-two grand,
Property Pages last night –
with which Mucky Preece is involved,
scraping the squit from his arse).