For many years George Perreault has lived primarily in the American West, a region he describes in language which is both intensely lyrical and grounded in a sense of place.   His second book of poetry enlarges his exploration of what has been called "his dialectic of love and loss" to embrace voices rarely heard in poetry -- the football coach, the stripper, the paramedic.  These are often poems of great risk, alternatively savage and tender, full of humor and melancholy, of wide-ranging intellect and staggering sensuality.



Reading the Signs

The roadside's alive with last chances,
fields full of mesquite, broom snake weed,
sunflower eyes brown as yours.

Everything signifies
except that billboard south of Melrose
which has baffled me for years:

     Love is a hammer that
     breaks the hardest heart.

Was it raised in affirmation,
the glitter of private parts?
An act of contrition?
A stab at revenge?
The inevitable aftermath?
I don't expect to ask.

Night comes on.  Headlights approach
intermittently over the rolling plains.
Time after time we choose when to dim,
when seeing won't serve like a darkness
we enter, hoping not to crash.