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Poem Of The Week: Soirée By Peter Reading (1946-2011)

Soirée

One funny thing about loving someone
is how much you'll put up with - her parents'
conversazione for example,
or being sweet to these fools she works with
who smoke inferior cigars and think
it's savoir vivre, and drag me back to drink
inadequately and long past my bedtime,
and put on records (God!) stuff like Ray Conniff.
And all their damn fool questions 'tell me Peter,
what do you write about?' (cunts like you mate).
'Peter, you interested in history?'
(Mate, I ain't even interested in
the present.) Still I'm here because I love her.

Peter Reading's knee-jerk antipathies are hung out like laundry in this deliciously acerbic punt at the manners and asinine rituals of Vers de Société. And perhaps Philip Larkin's sniffily sardonic dig at his own social milieu in the titular poem which appeared in print only two years prior to Reading's, had some subliminal bearing on the mood and tone of 'Soirée'.

With wit and brutal conviction - the 'conversazione' and 'savoir vivre' are deliberate piss-takes of the arch vocabulary of the poet's 'antagonists', just as Larkin's 'Vers' hoists his academic coterie by its own cultural petard - Reading retains supreme satirical control until the corrective volte-face of the final line.

The ambiguity that adds much complexity to his work returns here: swallowing his embittered tongue for the sake of love, Reading emits a feint echo of Larkin's poem, whose concluding note of resignation sacrifices a natural inclination for isolation in favour of unwanted social engagement:

'Beyond the light stand failure and remorse
Whispering Dear Warlock-Williams: Why, of course.'

Soirée is taken from The Prison Cell & Barrel Mystery, published by Secker & Warburg (1976)

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