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Gregory Woods
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Poetry
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Gregory Woods, We Have the Melon (Carcanet Press, 1992)
The title is a quotation from Walt Whitman, and refers to one of the short poems in the book.
When the long poem ‘First of May’ won a prize in the 1989 Skoob poetry prize, the chair of the judges, Sir Stephen Spender, asked to see more of my poetry. I gave him a typescript of a longer version of this collection. He liked what he saw and encouraged me to send it to publishers. The book was taken up by Carcanet Press, with whom I have remained ever since.
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Gregory Woods, May I Say Nothing (Carcanet Press, 1998)
From the cover blurb:
‘May I Say Nothing is a collection of homo-erotic verses on both personal and broader social themes. The book is in three parts. The first opens with formal poems about key figures in past gay culture, whom Woods implicitly connects with aspects of contemporary life. The second part consists of twelve-line poems on themes progressing from desire, through consummation, to loss and the renewal of desire. The third part contains mainly longer, narrative poems in a variety of forms, exploring themes of masculinity and power, love and hatred, youth and ageing. A more troubled book than Woods’ celebrated volume We Have the Melon (1992), May I Say Nothing integrates his celebrations of male physicality into a context of repression and violence. The victory is in the fact that the beauty of the male body survives the questionable causes it is expected to serve.’
The title is a quotation from Oscar Wilde, his last words at the third of his trials in 1895: ‘And I, may I say nothing, my lord?’
The book has an epigraph from Jean Genet: ‘more objectivity, more passivity, more indifference, hence poetry’.
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Gregory Woods, The District Commissioner's Dreams (Carcanet Press, 2002)
From the cover blurb:
‘The District Commissioner’s Dreams' is an integrated collection of poems in which Gregory Woods returns to themes of obsession, possession and violence. Exploring masculinity, the opening section draws on struggles for power in both ancient and more recent history. These poems dissect men’s vanities and desires in ways that expose the personal facets of heroism and atrocity.
‘In the pivotal central section, Woods revisits a colonial childhood and the roots of his own development as a writer. The third section then combines personal reminiscences with a sceptical re-examination of sexual liberation. Working in a wide variety of forms, Woods treads the thin line between adoration and exploitation, exerting a rigid control of tone in poems whose moods vary between anger at one extreme and hilarity at the other. The outcome is a cool appraisal of all those familiar affinities between the power of love and the love of power.’
The collection has an epigraph from Carl Jung’s Psychology and Religion:
‘The same men assured me that they never had dreams; they were the prerogative of the chief and of the medicine man. The medicine man then confessed to me that he no longer had any dreams, for they had the District Commissioner now instead. “Since the English are in the country we have no dreams any more,” he said. “The District Commissioner knows everything about war, and about where we have got to live.”’
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Gregory Woods, Quidnunc (Carcanet Press, 2007)
From the cover blurb:
‘A quidnunc is a gossip, someone who is constantly asking ‘What now?’ ‘Quidnunc’ is a poem in which four individuals are haunted in different ways by what they have not forgotten. And Quidnunc is a collection in which, whether recent or distant, personal or cultural, the past is keenly felt.
‘Woods writes with bravura and eloquence in free verse, syllabics and metrics,
both rhyming and not. His poems scan the intersections between politics, aesthetics and desire. In their accounts of aloof devotion and intimate aggression, Contingency wrestles with Fate, and history fades into enticing rumour.’
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