Output details

An Ordinary Dog

Working against the British lyric mainstream of sentimental individualism, and the gay mainstream of subcultural identification, An Ordinary Dog continues a career-long exploration of Modernist transactions between tradition and innovation. Mixing metrical, syllabic and free-verse poems, Woods takes as one of his models the way in which the detachment of early, formalist Thom Gunn relaxed into the looser forms of late Gunn; the closeted poet into the liberated poet. Various other influences are in play, from the ‘light’ verse of Auden in the first two parts to European post-war Modernists like Czeslaw Milosz and Miroslav Holub in the third and fourth.

The book contains nineteen sonnets, some completely conventional (e.g. ‘Newton at Woolsthorpe’, written under Newton’s apple tree), others more fluid. The tightest form uses half-rhyme with 14 different vowel sounds with the whole poem, apparently straining not to rhyme (pp.5, 46, 62). At the opposite extreme, there are sonnets insistently rhymed AAAA throughout (pp.16, 22). Couplets of homophones (‘Action and Reaction’, ‘Echo’s Echoes’) take rhyme to another potentially uncomfortable extreme. Line lengths vary between 6 (p.56) and 14 syllables (p.54). Intensity of emotion comes not from unmediated ‘passion’ but from a dispassionate tone.

Throughout, form shadows function (as in the alternating masculine and feminine line-endings of ‘Her Hair Is Her Religion’, a poem about a drag queen). The most fixatedly erotic poems have the most costive structures.

Woods always plays off his poetry against a history of narrative fiction and epic verse. In this volume, fiction is most visibly represented by fragmentary translations of the 19th-century French novel. These originate in the readings of Gautier and Balzac in his History of Gay Literature (Yale UP, 1998). These and longer narratives in the collection (‘The Sweet Life’, ‘Theorem’) explore Woods’ customary themes of causality and contingency.