BOOK REVIEW: Poetry that carries the texture, smell, and sound of variety of lands

In this book of gloom and darkness the author screams against injustices and oppression meted out to the underprivileged members of society.

Book Title: Farhang Book One
Publisher: ECW Press, Toronto, Canada
Author: Patrick Woodcock
Reviewer: Dr. Christopher Okemwa

A good poem normally should achieve that evocative power that stirs the reader’s depths; its lines contain some sort of magic that works on the reader’s subconscious and makes them wonder how the poet came to see things the way he did. Such self-transcending quality of a poem is hard to come by, except in famous poems such as “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day?” by William Shakespeare, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Waste Land” by T.S. Eliot, “And Still I Rise” by Maya Angelou, “Because I Could Not Stop” by Emily Dickinson, and “If” by Rudyard Kipling.

Recently, I came across such a poem that uplifted my spirits and made me see things from a different lens. The poem is titled “The birth and suicide of my Peter Shaw” in the poetry book Farhang Book One by a Canadian poet Patrick Woodcock.

The poem reads in part:
He rode the harlequinade like a horse, trotted
and trundled like a muddled marionette.
He was born of the wheeled and wheeling,
the crabbing and cocked, until he left
the pulsing panorama of the pediatric tomb
to rock within the chug chug chug of train
and pint, for another’s song, another’s story,
another’s moonlight when waterfalling to sleep.
(“The birth and suicide of my Peter Shaw”, P.13)

The poem makes the reader’s insides reverberate and makes them get a new definition of poetry. With the startling imagery and fresh diction, combined with repetition device and alliterative word-play, Woodcock is able to travel with the reader and immerse them in his experiences. One might question the quality of a prose poem like this one, and argue that it lacks traits of a poem. Well, like “The birth and suicide of my Peter Shaw” there already exists many great prose poems, such as the famous poem “The Fake Tears of Shirley Temple” by Patricia Lockwood, “Kills bugs dead” by Harryette Mullen, “When I was six years old” by Marosa di Giorgio, “Information” by David Ignatow, and “The bats arrived” by Marosa di Giorgio. These poems are popular and rated highly even if they are prose in nature. What is notable is that they are not broken into verse lines as we normally believe poetry should be.

But they have traits that qualify them to be poetry. First, like Woodcock’s poem above, they have well embedded internal rhythm, a quality that all good poetry should have. Secondly, figures of speech common in poetry such as symbols and metaphors qualify a prose composition to pass as poetry. “The birth and suicide of my Peter Shaw” above is no exception; it employs metaphors, alliterative word-play to deepen meaning, and staccato phrasings that come rapidly to create a sense of movement and urgency in the poem.

For Woodcock, the use of prose poetry is suitable as his poetry tends to capture his experiences in form of stories, and therefore the mode is apt for vividness and precision. But Patrick does not only write prose poems in Farhang Book One, he also writes poems that are broken into verse lines:

Saint Sergius, what a smell.
I cannot see. I cannot sleep.
The surge, the swell, the nostril’s tell.
The nonmonastic bottled swill.
The godforsaken grinding shrill
of runners, monks and all who plod:
“Drink as if approaching God!”
(“Holy water from Trinity Lavra smells rancid”, P.25)

And he even writes in short neat lines as in the poem, ‘He said, “Dik-diks never remarry, like christians.”’

the little ones
look up to me
the christian ones
not yet alone
they live in fear
the little ones
soon to be torn
from horn to tail
by everything
above the grass
by everything
that winds within (P.87)

Poetry, like any creative art, carries the texture, smell, and sound of the soil on which it is created. Like other genres, it cannot be created in a vacuum. It is compelled to carry with it the activities of the society from which the poet hails. Even art-for-arts’ sake still will, in many ways, carry in it an iota of material picked from the land it is created. It cannot afford to be entirely void of content, or some residual from the human condition.

This is very true of Farhang Book One. Being a migrant writer, Patrick Woodcock is not stationed in one place like most poets; his home is “everywhere but where you stand” (P. 105), as one of the poems states. He has lived in Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Kurdish North of Iraq, Azerbaijan, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Colombia. As a result of his “everywhere” condition the poems in Farhang Book One capture activities, not only from one region, but from a variety of societies in the world where Woodcock has lived, interacted, made friends, met the downtrodden people, experienced hunger, anger, happiness and sadness. Farhang Book One captures that vast experience of the author, including the experience of politics and politicians, war and death.

His poetry runs like life itself, weaving in activities a reader can identify with: “You sit, stare and rock, slowly, remembering a / grandmother’s cottage, how warm it felt, and how / you airlifted the flotilla of miniature spiders, that you / first thought pepper, out of your soup onto the floor. / You wouldn’t fish them out today, you’ve learned to / wolf down whatever is placed before you. / Invigorated, you would offer to go up on the roof to / clean the chimney you can’t recall existed. But you / do remember she first greeted you from atop the roof / of her house. Up there in her seventies, haloed by / storm clouds, lifted by more of a lattice than ladder.” Woodcock even displays the ability to create poems from stuff poets normally don’t make poems from, such as “The Saddest Toilet”:

The saddest toilet
sulks in the sun.
Its yellow doors,
white walls
and cinder blocks
slump forlornly
in a field
behind
a god-forgotten
truckstop. (P.60)

Woodcock’s tone is sad. He condemns, castigates and criminalizes vices committed by people upon others — negative attitude, racism, homophobia, and bad politics — and sees them as catalysts of poverty and disparity between communities and societies of the world. His poetry tends to scream, pointing at the evil acts committed by those in power upon the underprivileged in the society. In one of the refined poems about Kenya, “Crawl”, he captures the smell of despair and hopelessness in Kenya. He describes a man whom he saw crawling, pulling and dragging his body towards a petrol station.

Woodcock describes the place upon which the man crawled as gravel and shards of glass

pop tabs and crushed cans, upon
perpetual scrap, the flaky and friable
world of the hard shoulder.
Upon the debris of chicken lost. Upon
wind born migrations of filaments
and screw thread contacts. (P.94)

Describing the place on which the man crawled, he further observes that he crawled “Upon all the remnants of collisions and windshield wiper/arms bent into v s / for the vainglorious who snapped / photos from the tourist bus. Upon torn / illustrations of Christ, freed from the candle / by radiant heat. Upon labyrinths of cigarette butts, spark wheels and hoods. / Upon everything jettisoned by them”. His description is vivid, lucid and in color. He has the skill of using words and idioms in a startling and refreshing way.

Farhang Book One is the first of a series of three books that is intended to capture Woodcock’s experiences in the countries he has lived. Every poet should read Farhang Book One for its myriad human experiences it presents to the world and for its unique style of writing. Patrick Woodcock, who lives in Iqaluit, has written 10 books including You can’t bury them all and Echo Gods and Silent Mountains. He is a writer, a volunteer, a philanthropist and a teacher.

Reviewer: Dr. Christopher Okemwa, senior lecturer at Kisii University
Tel. 0723868167, E-Mail: chris@okemwa.co.ke

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