After mapping national decline over thirty years through twenty books, Peter Reading turns back in Faunal from blighted and bloated Old Blighty to focus vulture-like on threatened species, from feckless man himself to woodcocks, warblers and the whooping cranes of Texas. This also is his childhood territory, for birds and animals were his rst love before darker obsessions seized his imagination. His early naturalists habit of close observation has persisted through his poetry, which in Faunal depicts wildlife from Mexico and Australia to Homers wine-dark Aegean and the urban backwaters of Britain and America. Reading has an unerring eye for his birds, bats and beasts, moving between natural and human habitats with all his senses alert for danger and duplicity. Here be swamp alligators and crab-crunching sea otters, the free-flying frigate bird and the oil-slicked auk on the beach, the rabbit felled by myxomatosis and Homo sapiens oundering after chemotherapy. Faunal is both an ecologists eld notebook of poems and an anthropol-ogists account of his last expedition: half Noahs Ark, half Ship of Fools. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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Peter Reading (1946-2011) was born in Liverpool. After studying painting at Liverpool College of Art, he worked as a schoolteacher in Liverpool (1967-68) and at Liverpool College of Art, where he taught Art History (1968-70). He then worked for 22 years as a weighbridge operator at an animal feedmill in Shropshire, a job which left him free to think, until he was sacked for refusing to wear a uniform introduced by new owners of the business. His only break was a two-year residency at Sunderland Polytechnic (1981-83). After leaving Liverpool, he lived for 40 years in various parts of Shropshire, in recent years in Ludlow. The benevolence of Americas Lannan Foundation rescued him from poverty. He was the first writer to hold the one-year Lannan writing residency in Marfa, Texas (in 1999), and is the only British poet to have won the Lannan Award for Poetry twice, in 1990 and 2004, as well as the only poet to read an entire lifes work for the Lannan Foundations DVD archive his filmed readings for Lannan (made in 2001 and 2010) of 26 poetry collections make up the only archive of its kind. His other honours included the Cholmondeley Award, the Dylan Thomas Award for Diplopic (1983), and the Whitbread Prize for Poetry for Stet (1986). Work in Regress was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize in 1997. All his poetry is published by Bloodaxe Books, along with Isabel Martins critical study Reading Peter Reading (2000). His first collection was Water and Waste (1970), published when he was 24, and his last, 26th collection, was Vendange Tardive, published forty years later in 2010. Each of his collections is self-contained, as carefully constructed and plotted as a novel, interweaving voices and narrative strands which can be seen to link the 24 books which make up his Collected Poems, published in three volumes: 1: Poems 1970-1984 (1995), 2: Poems 1985-1996 (1996) and 3: Poems 1997-2003 (2003). His later collections from Bloodaxe are -273-15 (2005) and Vendange Tardive (2010).
