Taken together with Collected Poems 2 it provides a useful occasion to reconsider the work of this provocative and important writer. Reading spends a lot of time satirizing blas tabloid horror, but after a while his very shrillness comes to seem blas and self-protecting too. But think about it. The Sitcom . His dialectic of high and low culture too sometimes causes Reading problems.
High culture is celebrated while social ills continue uncured.
It's hard not to suspect that, beneath the junk-culture nihilism, there lurks a deeply puritanical writer clinging to the hope that one day Sibelius will get round to solving problems like homelessness. One of the most effective things in Reading is his use of transition, the surreal jump-cuts and splicings that make his poetry so much more than the sum of its frequently monocular and offputting parts. Reading loves his junk, but cannot quite bring himself to renounce high culture entirely. His use of the classics and classical metres is only one example of his furtive, almost blushing investment in it. For poems like 'Nips', 'Obit' and 'Integration' alone, Work in Regress is worth anyone's time and money.