Peter Reading, For the Municipality’s Elderly

Peter Reading’s book, For the Municipality’s Elderly, shows evidence of Reading’s literary mentors, Frost, Hopkins, Auden, Eliot, and Larkin amongst others, as well as a distinctively individual voice and style. The poems’ interest in decay and death presages Reading’s permanent themes of transcendence through nature alone, and the all-pervasiveness of death. The book also contains almost all the poems included in the Outpost Publications book (1970), Water and Waste.

Mr. Reading has said, “Amongst the places I tried to bombard with stuff was Outposts Magazine. Howard Sergeant wrote to me saying, ‘I don’t want to use the enclosed, but would you like to produce a small book?’. That was how Water and Waste came about.”