Marfan

Grief, decline and exile have been Peter Reading’s persistent themes through twenty books written over thirty years. After staring into death’s Medusa face in his recent work, the scourge of Britain’s sham uncaring society sentences himself to a year’s exile deep in the empty heart of Texas in Marfan. This richly observed, unsparingly caustic book-length poem presents an unflattering but grimly affectionate portrait of the hick town of Marfa (pop. 2,474). Here be cowpokes and Bible bashers, crazies in Chevies, trigger-happy Border Patrolmen and gabby old-timers in Ray’s Bar, all intent on bending Reading’s ear. And he takes it all in, just as the slaughtered Indians and despised ‘Spiks’ have done, but this suspicious stranger answers back. In blackly ironic, highly sophisticated poetry created in their own language, out of their own drawling mouths, Reading’s rednecks damn themselves in this latter-day divine comedy set in an arid all-American wasteland. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.