Faunal

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 first love before darker obsessions seized his imagination. His early naturalist’s habit of close observation has persisted through his poetry, which in Faunal depicts wildlife from Mexico and Australia to Homer’s 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 floundering after chemotherapy. Faunal is both an ecologist’s field notebook of poems and an anthropol-ogist’s account of his last expedition: half Noah’s Ark, half Ship of Fools. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.