Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ISTVÁN D. RÁCZ Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading
8 István D. Ri.cz (A bucolic employee of South Shropshire Farmers Ltd.) (The Craven Arms, Stretton & Tenbury Advertiser ) You remember that old boy Marsh? —im as lived at Stokesay? —forever picking is nose? Well, this morning ees takin some cattle over the line (course they got underpass, like, but also the level crossin as mostly they uses), an 7.15 from Stretton runs over the fucker —course kills im, like, never you seen such a mess, cows an all. Still, it dunna matter a lot —ee were daft as a coot. (Collected Poems 155) A Stokesay farmer was killed when he was struck by a train on a stretch of track near Craven arms. He was Mr John Jeremiah Marsh, a 60-year-old bachelor of Stokesay Castle Farm, and the accident occurred just yards from his home, at Stokeswood —an unmanned level crossing. Mr Marsh is thought to have opening the gate. The train which struck him was pulling 39 goods wagons on its way to Carlisle. Typography imitates a distorted mirror image and both sides tell the story of the same accident. One text is in a phonetically spelt dialect; the other is a news item. This poem can also be read as a variation on and the aftermath of the ballad form, particularly if one reads it in the context of the whole oeuvre. It is the provocative callousness of the two texts that evokes sympathy with the man who died; this sympathy is a contemporary version of the classic catharsis. But most readers would probably see this poem as self-reflection first of all, since the vision of the accident raises several questions. Which story is the original one, and which is the mirror image? Is it the language of journalism that gives form to the raw material of dialect diction, or is it the other way round? Does the diction of the rural person fill the factual news item with life? These questions, of course, only serve to bring it home to us that they are not correct as no text can be identical with the event itself. Consequently, both texts in the poem are distorted images of each other. The juxtaposition of different texts in some poems by Reading seems to be so accidental that it resembles the Neo-Dada. Importantly, this is only the first impression of such texts, since Reading is an extremely conscious poet. Contingency is not the guiding principle of his poems; it is thensubject matter. "Ex Lab" is the monologue of an archeologist working in a laboratory, based on free associations, still fully conscious. The reader can detect when he works, when he takes a coffee break, and when his attention is distracted. This is the reason why different forms of communication and reflection are juxtaposed:
