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

Memory, Writing, Politics: the Poetry of Peter Reading 5 with the protest against it, and closes with the act of writing a controversial text. In the form of classicist-romantic contemplation, the voice of the poet says that such contemplation is out of date. The question what nature means to us today is still hanging in the air, and it is answered in the last stanza: Yet one feels almost justified still to acknowledge the deeper reflection of, albeit hackneyed, the Human Condition in Nature (reduced as she is from the nympho once over-extolled for ad-nauseam cyclic fecundity, to today's stripped-bare and thorny old sod half-heartedly whorily pouting a couple of blackening nipples). (Collected Poems 37) We can still use nature as a signifier of human existence, but then we need to find the ugly and the base in it. This is why the blackened raspberries are transformed into the distorted nipples of Mother Earth. The poem seems to ask: what can a poet do with a nature that has been destroyed? The answer is complicated, not only because the poem has even been written, but also since the implied poet regards it only as "almost justified". He does not say that writing nature poetry is impossible today; he only suggests that instead of mechanically applying conventional patterns, we should consider the essence behind existence, namely the significance and consequences of destroying nature. Remembering is the topic of another early poem, "Mnemonic". The opening sentence ("I will think of you in three ways") could be read as a sentimental confession in isolation, but the title gives it a completely different meaning: the function of the poem is not expression, it is setting up a model for a technique of mnemonic. It is a text about practising remembering and the use of the verb think suggests that the basis of all thinking is memory. This reading is reinforced by the three groups of images which the speaker enumerates as the attributes of the person remembered, and which are even numbered to evoke the atmosphere of conscious exercise. The three basic images are those of the working, the painting, and the socializing person (perhaps a lover or a friend). The easiest meaning the reader constructs is this: one can only remember another person if one is able to recollect him/her as s/he is working, doing a creative job, and relaxing. But there are at least two further layers shining through this surface. One is the representation of accidentalism. The speaker's selection of past events is emphatically accidental and concessive. (The word or is used seven times.) Consequently, remembering is inevitably selective and manipulative: through our selections we manipulate ourselves. When we