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

4 István D. R

i.cz will become in the present act of recollection. Consequently, his lyric poetry is the opposite of elegiac poems: what is done in romantic verse, or even in Philip Larkin's poetry, is perceived in Reading. He is also an outsider in this sense. Nevertheless, in another sense, he is romantic in principle since he sees his life work as an organic whole. He has commented that his poems are related to each other as the chapters in a novel (The Poetry Quartets 3). Of course, a poet reflecting on himself can be even more simplistic than a critic is. Therefore, we should be cautious with accepting this view. It does not mean, in the first place, that most of his poems cannot be understood and enjoyed in isolation. But undoubtedly, the cohesion in Reading's poetry is remarkable: some of his volumes contain only one long text, he has written twin texts, self-reflexivity is a spectacular feature of his poems, and many of them can be interpreted as the re-reading of an earlier text. His volume of collected poems (that is, in Reading's own view, his "novel") starts with nature poems. One of these, "Raspberrying", uses a traditional pattern: the description of a landscape is followed by the contemplation of the implied poet, and the poem is closed with a generalizing conclusion. But the opening lines seem to be disturbing, since the speaker notices ugliness, rather than beauty, in nature: Last sim ripens each one, through rubicund, black then each rots. Lines are tight with late swallows, oak rattles leaves icicle-brittle.

.. The speaker sees a landscape, but he remembers the conventions of landscape poetry. The essence of remembering is the comparison between a sight in the presence and a form in the past: A bit neo-pastoral, one will admit, but then something conspiring to make decay more than the usual end of a season makes Nature itself as anachronistic today as a poem about it. The opening line of stanza 2 reflects on the first one by admitting that writing nature poetry without the traditions of pastoral poetry is impossible. In this convention the essence of an autumn poem is that decay in nature is transformed into a symbol (or, at least, a synecdoche). It is exactly this form which makes nature as 'anachronistic' as a landscape poem. This very text may be added to Reading's own ideas. Something can be called anachronistic only on the basis of remembering its former modes of existence in the past and comparing it with the present. Exploring the act of remembering proceeds line by line: it starts with acknowledging convention, continues