Faunal

Respected in Britain since the early 1980s, Peter Reading, after 20-odd books, has begun to find an American audience for his poems and sequences of despair and misanthropy in demanding classical meters. Reading's last offering, Marfan, described rural Texas: Faunal, his latest, sends him all over America and Australia in search of endangered or hard-to-find mammals, birds and fish, whose ""spectacular/ phenomena"" Reading sets against our own irresponsible species, ""at once vile and intractable."" Trojan War stories, myxomatosis (a grisly disease of rabbits) and epigrammatic couplets (""We can't foretell this morning/ what will befall this evening"") give Reading welcome counterpoints for his laconic verse study of ecocide.