{"id":2654,"date":"2023-02-09T11:26:48","date_gmt":"2023-02-09T11:26:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2654"},"modified":"2023-02-09T11:32:30","modified_gmt":"2023-02-09T11:32:30","slug":"gerard-woodward-the-vulture-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2654","title":{"rendered":"Gerard Woodward, The Vulture – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

The poems of The Vulture<\/em> don\u2019t make small adjustments to our perception of the world, like those in Hannah Lowe’s The Kids<\/a>, they present it in radically strange and dislocated terms. Sometimes this happens with startling abruptness. For example, \u2018The Fish Head\u2019 opens \u201cI found a fish head \/ With the face of Elizabeth the First\u201d.\u00a0 Sometimes the machinery of estrangement revolves in a more gradual way and sometimes (as in \u2018The Fish Head\u2019 itself) what opens in the one way may go on to develop in the other.<\/p>\n

Such a kicking loose from common perceptions offers the excitement of radical originality but forgoes straightforward drawing on established attitudes and emotions.\u00a0 Although I always admired Woodward\u2019s ingenuity, inventiveness and intellectual control, there were times when the brilliance felt cold, even mechanical, or simply piled on too thickly. At times, far-fetched analogies multiplied in ways that dissipated a poem\u2019s imaginative energies. For example, \u2018The Piano Stool\u2019 starts with a leap of surreal fantasy that is both exhilarating in itself and gives the mind something emotionally suggestive to work on \u2013<\/p>\n

Black wood, as though the piano had calved.
\nFour straight legs , thin and unmuscled<\/p>\n

It ends in a way that returns to the idea of a new-born calf but now also suggests a stunted, neglected human child:<\/p>\n

Still with its secret cache, it stood awkwardly,
\nLooking as if it might cry out for its mother,
\nMassive and immoveable in the next room.<\/p>\n

Between these points, though, there\u2019s a volley of distractingly different comparisons and the final effect suffers as a result.<\/p>\n

The poems that seem to me to work most triumphantly give the surrealist impulse more restrained or more focused play. At the lighter end of the spectrum, \u2018Tommy Noddy\u2019 evokes the idea of an elusively living being out of what was once a common sight and is now much less so, the quivering of light reflected on\u00a0 the ceiling from a mobile surface like water in a sink. The tone shimmers beautifully between pathos and humour, describing an experience that\u2019s being lost as the way we wash up changes, and evoking a life that isn\u2019t really alive. The sonnet \u2018Carpeting\u2019 uses a series of images of fish and water \u2013 starting with a comparison of a rug to a skate\u2019s wing \u2013 to create a hauntingly elusive meditation on the ultimate vanity of the attempt to impose stability on the flux of life, and on the obliquity and difficulty of human relations. Most powerfully, \u2018Frog Deaths\u2019 compares spawning frogs to human scholars, scientists, gardeners, architects of a culture, then describes them dying under the freezing of their spawn. The grave tone, the slow pace and steady rhythmic march seem to me to tease us into giving a certain sombre weight to the parallels to human achievement and decay as we read:<\/p>\n

The frogs in the pond have read deep
\nInto their history. Scholarly, they hold
\nSeminars, conferences. Their writing
\nComes to life, bubblejets of print,
\nClusters of it. Oh \u2013 they have wired together
\nAn artificial brain!<\/p>\n

The true brilliance of the poem, though, is in its elusiveness of tone, in the way it flickers between suggesting these things and making a joke of its own whole series of preposterous analogies (the fleeting suggestion of Elizabeth Bishop\u2019s voice at the end of my quotation adds to this feeling).\u00a0 We\u2019re left unsure how seriously to take them, and it seems to me that being made to register the poem\u2019s possible seriousness in this oblique way, having its dark intimations hovering in peripheral vision rather than being looked at squarely, gives it and them a more intimate, lingering effectiveness, like that of James Fenton\u2019s superb sixteen line poem \u2018Wind\u2019, which is superior to this in its conciseness and swiftness of operation but is the same sort of achievement.<\/p>\n

Behind the difference between the way Hannah stays close to common ways of seeing the world and Woodward kicks radically free of them, there\u2019s a larger contrast between a poetry that is essentially concerned with people\u2019s interactions in daily life and a poetry driven essentially by ideas and visual associations. I enjoyed both books in different ways. Some readers may feel more at home with one than the other.<\/p>\n

The Vulture<\/em> by Gerard Woodward. Picador Poetry. 128pp., \u00a310.99<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Danielle Hope, the editor of Acumen, for permission to post this review, which appeared in Acumen 104<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The poems of The Vulture don\u2019t make small adjustments to our perception of the world, like those in Hannah Lowe’s The Kids, they present it in radically strange and dislocated terms. Sometimes this happens with startling abruptness. For example, \u2018The Fish Head\u2019 opens \u201cI found a fish head \/ With the face of Elizabeth the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[198],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2654","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gerard-woodward"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2654"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2658,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2654\/revisions\/2658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2654"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2654"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2654"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}