Faunal - Softcover

Reading, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852245875 ISBN 13: 9781852245870

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd, 2003

Synopsis

Meet Peter Reading, birdwatcher and eco-worrier. This book shows a new side to Peter Reading's work.

About this title

About the Author:

won the Lannan Literary Award for poetry in 1990, and in 1998-99 held the first eighteen collections are published in hardback and paperback in his two-volume collected poems: Poems 1970-1984 (1995) and collected Poems: Poems 1985-96. All his poetry is published by Bloodaxe, including Work in regress (1997) Ob. (1999), Marfan (2000), and [unitiled] (2001), along with Isabel Martin's critical study Reading Peter Reading (2000).

From Booklist:

While society has decomposed around him, Reading has taken solace in watching birds and other creatures. Many of these poems report his sightings and, Reading being Reading (see [untitled], BKL F 1 02), his despair and rage when he apprehends how endangered all animals have become, thanks to humankind. He can't see an armadillo "scruttering into the brush" without rejoicing that the sight "requires no fancy moral / or intellectual envoi"--that is, no human interpretation--to make it worthwhile; and he can't regard his fellow watchers as more than "vapid goons." Yet he isn't utterly misanthropic; he acknowledges that but for the dotty woman feeding the birds year round in a Dutch city park, "we would be undernourished." He also re-envisions historic travels: the young Charles Darwin's in "Journey," and the Greeks' to Troy (with interpolations about more of his wanderings and St. Brendan's voyage to the New World) in "Laertidean." A book that should make much more mindful travelers of its readers. Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 1852245875
• ISBN 13: 9781852245870
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64