Book description
In Island to Island, his third collection of poetry for Chatto, Gerard
Woodward ventures into more hostile, less familiar territory. An Arabian
desert, the moon, thinly-populated archipelagos are all visited in what
emerges as an investigation into the nature of social space. A giraffe
trapper finds that a successful trap must closely resemble a giraffe's
own home; the 'suburban glass' of starter-home conservatories glazes and
crysallises the lives of newly-weds. With his characteristic exuberance
and ability to stand the world on its head, Woodward combines tichly
imagined poems about half-invented lands with poetry that transforms the
ordinary into the fantastical, where baths become oceans and ceilings
lunar landscapes. Nor is the body exempt from this exploration of
borders and limits. In one poem, two 'gurning' contestants find that
they've overstepped some boundary of humanness and in 'The Madness of
Heracles', a long retelling of the myth of the twelve labours, human
strength is put to the test in a poem which evolves into a rhapsody of
love, loss, toil and redemption. Born in London in 1961, Gerard
Woodward studied painting and anthropology. His two previous
collections,
Householder
(1991) and After The Deafening
(1994), were published by Chatto. He has won, among other prizes, the
Somerset Maugham Award and the Eric Gregory Award. 'The Madness of
Heracles' was runner-up in the most recent Avron International Poetry
Competition. Gerard Woodward lives in Manchester.
