Records of an Incitement to Silence

Gregory Woods

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800171299
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Longlisted for the Polari Book Prize 2022

Gregory Woods is the leading British critic and historian of gay literature. He has published five previous Carcanet poetry collections, the first being We Have The Melon (1992). Ten years in the making, Records of an Incitement to Silence revisits many of the original themes, but here Woods brings them closer to the endgame.

The sequence of stripped-down, unrhymed sonnets, and the longer poems that accentuate it, suggest a missing narrative: the growth of the individual in a world of upheaval, the search for and loss of love, the formation of memories, the limits of what can truthfully be said, the traces we leave and the chance of their survival.

'One of my creative habits, ' Woods writes, 'is the wringing-out of a single form until it's bone dry: the unrhymed sonnets; the monosyllabic syllabics of the long poem 'Hat Reef Loud'; the incompatible yoking-together of iambic pentameter and dactylic trimeter in the long poem 'No Title Yet'.' His formal stringency intensifies the poems' emotional and erotic charge, their celebration and their plaint.

xi

PART ONE

1

THE ENIGMA OF SURVIVAL

The fittest, who survives, seeks no reward

but rest from mortal combat’s melodrama.

By plighting his devotion to a sword

and delegating feeling to his armour,

anaesthetised by neat adrenaline,

he barely feels the piercing of his skin.

He need not even be the pluckiest

so long as he remains the luckiest.

The fittest, who survives, tries to conceal

his wounds, as if they suppurated thought.

Detached from the beliefs for which he fought,

a guilty conscience his Achilles heel,

he sways above the body of his rival,

upbraiding his own heart for its survival.

2

RECORDS OF AN INCITEMENT TO SILENCE

1

I woke in the night and struggled to find

the light switch, my glasses, a pen. I wrote:

It was as if all sounds

and smells were smells and sounds

of you.

I kept looking back. Did I not want to leave?

Did I already regret the journey I was embarking on?

Did I fear I would never pass this way again?

Was I expecting someone to appear on the quayside

to wave me away or call me back?

I wrote only sonnets.

They seemed to fit the shape of my complaint.

2

A truck was broken down at the side of the road,

its cab folded forward to expose the steaming engine.

The driver was crouching with his eyes shut

in the low shade of a banana tree.

3

For several years I lived in a city in the South.

Its people had a reputation for great warmth.

The climate of the gulf it clings to

had given them every reason

to be open-hearted and optimistic.

The furtive corruption of their officials went unremarked.

There was a uniformed guard with a submachine gun

at the door of every bank.

All was for the best.3

In those days we were young. What we learned of the world

we thought we were creating. We often looked for ourselves in mirrors.

We tested our edges against other surfaces.

4

The only trace of previous passers-by

was that of their roadside defecations,

coils of remorse, offloaded with relief,

coprolites to be picked over

by fossil-hunters millennia hence.

I ate the last of my bread before walking down into the village.

Where I had expected hostility my arrival was met with indifference.

I was the invisible traveller so often to be seen

in places no one visits without reason.

5

The annual tribute exacted by the Sovereign

was a single pebble from each province.

The regional governor was expected to deliv...