Books

Review by Francis Sheppard

Our region, the West Midlands, has always been a place of settlement from elsewhere. A major contributor has been Ireland. These fifty-two sonnets (the number itself having several resonances) detail the lives (and three deaths) that coalesce in the Lamb and Flag, a Worcester pub inconspicuous through being part of a line of ancient terrace buildings, in The Tything (photo below), directly north of the city centre. A culture of drinking is themed only lightly through each poem’s title, commonplace one- or two-syllable expressions that related to pubs or alcoholic intake (an ambivalence is maintained towards the latter.) Opening Time, the title of the collection, is an example of how this highly skilled writer draws multiple meanings in the pieces that follow – opening time, a time for disclosure, or examining both present and past, of the joys of living and the sadness of what inevitably follows. Woods’ genius, through opening of mundane bar-room subject-matter, is to make connections with our contemporary world, its multitudinous history as represented by the Flag’s customers, and the vastness of time that awaits their and our demise. This adeptness, this intellectual sure-footedness among the pinnacles of contemporary knowledge, put him in the company of Donne and Marvell, those soaring poetic intelligences of the seventeenth century.

Those poets dealt with time, and life’s brevity. They did so often with wry humour. This is true too of Woods. On second reading you laugh out loud at hereto-hidden meaning. Drinkers at the bar, their permanence, is satirised in On the Rocks with surprise that they ‘haven’t turned to stone’. What stone?

The obvious choice is sedimentary
for those who spend their lives sitting down
and drinking pints to chalk up on a slate
holding forth with fossilised ideas.

Here and elsewhere those who scorn and resist change are themselves held up for quiet ridicule. Though Woods sees further into the consequences of being so.

Eternity
is now they sometimes know but soon forget
and so look back with Orphean regret.

This is a beautifully produced book, with a properly stiff card cover, and heavy, glossy pages. It will provide many hours of reflective reading – and discovery. After my full-day’s immersion in it I was surprised by a sudden late-evening burst of hope. I had caught it from Woods who, for all his unwavering gaze at human existence and the present-day scene has the auditory sense for the music of both.