Records of an Incitement to Silence

'There is such authority in Woods' poems: the lyrical resignation of his rhythms, the music of experience in his voice, as in his repeated lines of longing: 'It was as if all sounds/and smells were smells and sounds/of you.' No word is out of place: a beautiful atmosphere is created from the mysterious streets, colonnades and rooms of each poem. There's restrained suffering in these pages, tempered by eroticism, wry wisdom, sly humour at his own and the world's foibles, alongside rich and varied technical skills... His investigation of solitude and examination of time include an impressive expertise in capturing the moment... Gregory Woods is an underestimated master at work, and Records of an Incitement to Silence, his sixth collection, shows him at the pinnacle of his craft.' Robert Hamberger
'It is a feat to describe a world so brimming over with dissatisfaction and disappointment with such precision. But of course, Gregory Woods, a poet with an engineer's eye for angles and plans, the economical lyricist and master of understatement, pulls it off as a coherent narrative whole from a collection of fractures, without a wasted word, nor sentiment.' Matt Nunn, Everybody's Reviewing
'His new collection is one of the most moving, formally dexterous, insistent, consistent collections I've read in many years. Buy it. You'll be glad you did.' Rory Waterman, Twitter
'One of the best poetry books of the year.' Ira Lightman, Twitter
'One of the best poetry books of the year.' Ira Lightman, Twitter
'This is one of my favourite poetry books of 2021. It surprises, moves and charms the pants off you all at the same time, due to its totally fresh style and vision. Its freshness echoes with the sounds and sensualities of Cavafy, Whitman, Gunn, even D.H.Lawrence perhaps. It is full of dogs (or rather one dog, a very characterful she-dog...) and loneliness, but also with the urgency of desire and sex...This is a collection that I will be dipping into, pondering, enjoying, and learning from, for a very long time to come.' Chris Beckett, London Grip
'Woods's conjurations are elliptical, smokily atmospheric; cinematic if one takes Resnais, Robbe-Grillet and perhaps Costa-Gavras as one's touchstone... His confidence in obscuring the sequence's chronology is to be applauded. He trusts the reader not only to recognise the interconnections and echoes and reverberations, but to appreciate that the isolation of minutiae - the Edward Hopper-like capture of single but intensely weighted moments - is vastly more important than the linear presentation of a series of scenes or episodes... a cityscape and mindscape unique in contemporary British poetry.' Neil Fulwood, The High Window