Four Poets and a Play
by Jeremy Reed
A vigorous, decadent poet in the symbolist tradition, Jeremy Reed holds a unique place in the literary and musical counterculture of England. Edmund White sums him up as 'Patti Smith meets Rimbaud at Graceland'. But Reed's milieu and his sensibility reach even further across time, linking punk rock to the Elizabethans to Bowie, glam, and contemporary giants such as John Ashbery, Thom Gunn, and John Weiners, poets who are the subject of Reed's scrutiny in these essays. At the center of the book is a play only Jeremy Reed could have written, Behind Closed Doors, set in the brutal underbelly of London's art and literary scene, a circle of hell Reed explores via the recorded conversations of the late painter, Francis Bacon.
'Jeremy Reed's talent is almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance. He is Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautreamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised.' — J.G. Ballard
