Peter Reading is one of the most inventive, idiosyncratic, and challenging of English poets under the age of forty. The son of Wilfred Reading, an electrical engineer, and Mary Catt Reading, he was born in Liverpool, and educated at the Alsop High School and Liverpool College of Art, where he trained as a painter and earned a B.A. degree in 1967 (it would be tempting to trace "painterly" concerns in his verse, but these are largely absent; the provincial art-college background is often drawn upon, however). He taught for a short time at a large comprehensive school in Liverpool before returning in 1968 to his former college as a lecturer in the department of art history. Since 1970 he has lived in Shropshire and done a variety of jobs of a menial nature at an animal feed mill; from 1981 to 1983 he held a fellowship at Sunderland Polytechnic. Reading married Diana...