Peter Reading, 1946–2011

By MICHAEL CAINES

The poet Peter Reading died last week. Writing in the TLS earlier this year, Paul Batchelor described him as a writer who set out to be different from everybody else, and succeeded: the best of his later poems "make much of what is published in the name of poetry seem merely decorative, and ornamental". But this original, versatile writer of despairing yet "defiantly humane" verse had also been on a journey into silence "from the start".

Today on the TLS website we publish Alan Jenkins's recollections of meeting Peter Reading, along with a small sample of the work Reading had published in the TLS over the years.