Marfan
Peter Reading
64pp, Bloodaxe, £6.95
Buy it at BOL
Peter Reading's latest volume, Marfan , is the fruit of a year spent in small-town Texas as "a solitary, voluntary exile", funded by the Lannan Foundation, an American institution which gives generous awards to writers.
After a decade of increasingly gloomy and abstract work, Marfan returns to the anecdotes, characterisations, monologues and reportage that comprised much of Reading's earliest work. The result is one of the most impressive volumes he has written; vivid, hilarious, intelligent and engaged.
The book is composed of chunks - not always individual poems - in various metres and registers, as Reading describes the inhabitants of Marfa, its history, politics, superstitions, geology and fauna. Verbatim conversations, snippets from the local paper, caricatures, descriptions and satires are all mingled, interspersed with photographs by Jay Shuttleworth and collages by the author. Occasional epiphanies gleam through the darker moods and gallows hilarity, as Reading sardonically calls attention to his own peculiar place as an English poet in Texan Hicksville:
For I am catapulted to the grandeur of Marfan Literary Resident (sinecure recently inaugurated by the beneficence of Patrick Lannan - blessandpreservehimandhiswholefoundation).
The tradition of literary gratitude to patrons must have been irresistible carrion for Reading's caustic irony; later he writes, deadpan, "'Twas then they sent in Lannan's secret weapon", and (more realistically, given his candour about the townsfolk) also notes: "When this gets published I shall have to be / beyond the City Limits in a Greyhound".
Reading never misses a connection, and another artist with patronage gets it in the neck. "Seems to me carpetbaggers shouldn't complain," Reading remarks of Donald Judd, the well-funded artist who built "100 waist-high milled aluminium boxes ... billion-dollar, minimalist, / factory-finish, self-indulgent art games" in Marfa, but who whined about the noise from the mill near his apartment. Reading also has other "carpetbaggers" in his sights: the Americans who kicked out the "injuns" ("the indigenous can fuck off outa here") and are now kicking out the "Spiks" (the American fear of aliens, whether extraterrestrial or Mexican, is scathingly satirised); the "arties, architects, carpetbaggers, entrepreneurs / 'gallery owners', leather coat boutiquers" snapping up real estate in Marfa; indeed, the human species itself, replacing the pterosaurs who "in the late Cretaceous ... darkly traversed the Big Bend floodplain".
These various perspectives, constantly overriding or undercutting each other, demonstrate Reading's continual compassion for the dispossessed as well as a delicate blend of contempt and respect for the lunacies of the townspeople he encounters. His vicious and emetic response to the "How y'all" greeting of Marfan locals (it "induces ... a desire to puke against the wall, / or evacuate one's chitterling, or spawl") is offset by a quotation from Nathaniel Hawthorne on his trip to Liverpool: "The British / sodden in strong beer, have a conversation / like a plum pudding - stodgy, bilious." An incongruous Wisden in the public library "charts the achievement of that English summer / before climacteric and post-bellum slump". Reading is not, that is, an Anglophile xenophobe; and a gnomic one-liner ("we call it Marfa, but we mean the lot") suggests that drawing a clear line between the specific and the general is not part of the plan.
Amid a wealth of detail - personal stories, local history and folklore, politics, paranoia, art, religion - Reading situates himself as a small and transitory speck in the bigger picture (his cherished "Rothko sunset") while treating us to his witty spleneticisms, brief sentimentalities, precise descriptions and not ungenerous amusement. As ever, despair, both environmental and political, is never absent; but this is an appreciative, defiantly humane volume, and a remarkable poetic evocation of a real place. The Lannan Foundation is getting its money's worth. So are we.
