Vendange Tardive

After mapping Britain’s national decline over thirty years through 25 books of poetry, Peter Reading has reinvented himself as a writer in his 21st-century work. The vitriolic social critic has become poetry’s Millennial prophet of doom, directing his venom and sorrow at the destruction of the world’s wildlife and environment. Vendange Tardive is a late harvest of vintage Reading in disaster mode. Here is a rueful crop of valedictory poems in which man reaps what he sows: shipwreck, ruin, death, war, ignomony and extinction. But somehow, amid all that, there is still the fruit of the vine and the bittersweet spirit of life.