An Ordinary Dog

Gregory Woods

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781847770783
• eBook ISBN: 9781847779137
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

An Ordinary Dog is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to - what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about desire: sacred and profane, serene and frantic, refined and grubby - often betrayed by cussedness, always complicated by external events. Looking back to times of crisis when history is endured and re-invented, An Ordinary Dog explores where myth degenerates into faith and reason falters. The mood veers between equanimity and desperation; the focus between detachment and intimate involvement.

One

Invocation

Come, hungry Muses, sink your fangs

into the rancid meat of things.

Give us another of those songs

that fizz the spittle on your tongues.

Descend on us in raucous gangs,

tattooed and sporting nipple rings.

Evacuate those tarry lungs

and goad us with your humour’s prongs.

Conciliate your hunger pangs

with scraps of life, the random slings

and arrows felt by human throngs.

Foregather where the tyrant hangs,

and harry anyone who brings

to human rights inhuman wrongs.

Figure of Enchantment

She wears red feathers

but white ones on feast days

and on her birthday scales.

Her fingers have claws

and black talons for shoplifting.

When she swims she grows fins

and on the verge of drowning gills.

In her rump she hides a sting

for any man who crosses her,

but the stinging tastes of honey

just before it hurts.

The feathers she wears

are as red as her hair

and when anybody plucks them

she shrieks as if winning a prize.

Her annual ovulations

bring the kids out on the streets,

maidens waving bunches of mimosa

and square-bashing boys

with badges and berets.

By night she hides from headlights

as if running from the law.

When it snows she weeps for all mankind

(a colander) incontinently, out of earshot.

Those who fall in love with her

fall out again with broken hearts

and grazed extremities.

Nobody comes close.

Objective Disorder

Propriety once segregated us from girls,

and passion followed suit. No laws or papal bulls

applied to adolescent guile within these walls.

For all that we were rendered regular by bells,

each body’s pulse subordinated to the school’s,

mortality’s unsentimental chisel gnarls

a boy’s credulity, and scepticism kills

his faith. The gods he worships then are human pals,

imperfect but more beautiful than bloodless souls.

Beneath a plaster Virgin’s blindness, like a doll’s,

a pair of us replace cold prayer with spattered vowels

of inarticulate delight. Each of us feels

himself, unlike the sheets our ecstasy defiles,

unspoilt by the division of our bodies’ spoils.

Age of Gold

Philosophy relied on words for its account

of love, but boys did well enough with groan and grunt.

Theirs was a class of flesh so laudable, by dint

of youth, that nothing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• About the Author
• Also by Gregory Woods from Carcanet Press
• Copyright