Records of an Incitement to Silence

Records of an Incitement to Silence by Gregory Woods, book cover

Gregory Woods, Records of an Incitement to Silence (Manchester: Carcanet, 2021)

Longlisted for the Polari Prize 2022

Rory Waterman:

“His new collection is one of the most moving, formally dexterous, insistent, consistent collections I’ve read in many years. Buy it. You’ll be glad you did.”

Robert Hamberger:

“There is such authority in Woods’s poems: the lyrical resignation of his rhythms, the music of experience in his voice […] No word is out of place: a beautiful atmosphere is created from the mysterious streets, colonnades and rooms of each poem. There’s restrained suffering in these pages, tempered by eroticism, wry wisdom, sly humour at his own and the world’s foibles, alongside rich and varied technical skills […] Gregory Woods is an underestimated master at work, and Records of an Incitement to Silence, his sixth collection, shows him at the pinnacle of his craft.”

Neil Fulwood, The High Window (Winter 2021):

“Woods’s conjurations are elliptical, smokily atmospheric; cinematic if one takes Resnais, Robbe-Grillet and perhaps Costa-Gavras as one’s touchstone. … [By the end of the book] the mysteries and cadences and images and dreamlike fragments of Records of an Incitement to Silence will have set the blood insistently drumming in the reader’s temples. It will have stimulated and dazzled them and left the door open for them to return to a cityscape and mindscape unique in contemporary British poetry.”

Chris Beckett, London Grip (January 2022):

“This is one of my favourite poetry books of 2021. It surprises, moves and charms the pants off you all at the same time, due to its totally fresh style and vision. Its freshness echoes with the sounds and sensualities of Cavafy, Whitman, Gunn, even D.H. Lawrence perhaps […] This is a collection that I will be dipping into, pondering, enjoying, and learning from, for a very long time to come.”

Ira Lightman:

“One of the best poetry books of the year.”

back to top