{"id":11929,"date":"2021-04-06T14:30:22","date_gmt":"2021-04-06T13:30:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11929"},"modified":"2021-04-06T14:30:51","modified_gmt":"2021-04-06T13:30:51","slug":"amy-woolard-neck-of-the-woods-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11929","title":{"rendered":"Amy Woolard | Neck of the Woods<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Amy Woolard Neck of the Woods, <\/em>Alice James Books, $16.95<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a perky, feisty quality to the writing in Amy Woolard\u2019s debut collection, Neck of the Woods.\u00a0 <\/em>A glance at a few of the titles of the poems will give some of the overall flavour of the collection: \u2018All Get Out\u2019, \u2018Girl Gets Sick of a Rose\u2019, \u2018On The Most Terrifying Character in The Wizard of Oz\u2019, \u2018Ain\u2019t No Party\u2019, and \u2018What I told the Cops\u2019.\u00a0 Of course, it\u2019s very easy to pick out certain titles, but the titles do tend to reflect the writing style, which is often punchy and driven.<\/p>\n

This, perhaps, the poetry of the Netflix generation.\u00a0 The imagery in the poems is heightened sometimes lurid, and that makes the poems very vivid and striking. In \u2018All Get Out\u2019, for example, begins, \u2018I\u2019ve been sweeping each room soundly, served up \/ Scraps to the hounds, & sewn lead sinkers\u00a0 into my best \/ Clothes & and the drapes.\u00a0 In every closet, an identical violin. \/ Days go by like the past owners of a house \/\/ circling the neighbourhood \u2013 there is no garden, \/ No elaborate stone wall, no glass door corsage \/ With light, your last-letter.\u2019\u00a0 Woolard uses that heightened, televisual, David Lynch type atmosphere to considerable effect.<\/p>\n

The personas who narrate most of the poems live on the edge of things, and the worlds they are on the edge of also feel precipitous.\u00a0 In \u2018An Engine that Won\u2019t\u2019, \u2018The town, my dear, is closing down; dead- \/ Bolts slipping into their sleeves, cicadas insisting \/\/ Like so many typewriters, drunk girls sleeping \/\/ In their shoes.\u2019\u00a0 There\u2019s a great physicality about Woolard\u2019s imagery.\u00a0 The images and the narratives are palpable and feel lived in.\u00a0 And those narratives mesh both woozily, in keeping with the people who populate them and who narrate them, but also consistently.\u00a0 Like David Lynch, Woolard creates coherent worlds even as, at the same time, they are surreal and lurid.<\/p>\n

In \u2018An Engine that Won\u2019t\u2019, the narrator breaks the fourth wall,<\/p>\n

Since April I\u2019ve had one foot
\nIn someone else\u2019s grave, a drunk girl who left me<\/p>\n

Her shoes. \u00a0The way she would move through a party
\nLike cursive, a car passing through the underlit dark, gleaming<\/p>\n

Like the eye of a cooked fish.\u00a0 What she didn\u2019t leave was a note.
\nWhat I mean is: what a cliffhanger.\u00a0 But wait, this is no time<\/p>\n

To excuse yourself, dear;\u00a0 this is no time for a smoke,<\/p>\n

As we can see here, Woolard\u2019s breaking of the fourth wall works with her easy ability with narrative. That interpolation, \u2018What I mean is: what a cliffhanger,\u2019 is part of the swift movement through the \u2018storyline\u2019 of the poem, from the drunk girl at the party, to the atmosphere created by the car passing through the underlit dark.\u00a0 Even that \u2018underlit\u2019 suggests the cinematic quality of much of Woolard\u2019s writing.\u00a0 And, at the end of the excerpt here, the turning of the narrative on its head almost, with the narrator reflecting on her own participation in the that story.<\/p>\n

Woolard is a highly imaginative writer.\u00a0 As I have suggested that imagination is both highly cinematic and also linguistically aware.\u00a0 Although Woolard could not be called a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, the surrealism of her imagination and the flow of her imagery is sometimes disruptive in a way that L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry seeks to be. In \u2018Mise en Place\u2019, a variation on the cinematic term \u2018mise en scene\u2019, the images run pell-mell, one after another,<\/p>\n

The peonies are popping! A fist that is also a kettle that is also
\nA pact petals made with whatever cabal of bees decides to stick<\/p>\n

Around.\u00a0 Let\u2019s all shake on it.\u00a0 Ah these lungs of mine the perfect
\nEmergency orange of extension cord oil.<\/p>\n

Here, the language is held, almost clenched in the imagery \u2013 the fist here is almost metonymic of the procedure \u2013 but around that clenched fist, a set of images buzzes much like the bees themselves.\u00a0 The fact that the bees are a \u2018cabal\u2019 is also part of the tension that Woolard builds here.\u00a0 And that imperative \u2018Let\u2019s all shake on it,\u2019 feels forced and threatening, as if it made an \u2018offer you couldn\u2019t refuse.\u2019 Then the final image of the lungs seemingly filled with a kind of oil makes interiorizes that threat;\u00a0 the lungs themselves an \u2018emergency orange.\u2019\u00a0 Woolard is pulling two lines of imagery together:\u00a0 the first is the imagery of the flowers, \u2018peonies\u2019, \u2018petals\u2019 and that final \u2018orange\u2019 that blends with the other flower images; \u00a0the second line of imagery is the body imagery, \u2018fist\u2019, the implicit \u2018hand\u2019 in \u2018let\u2019s shake on it\u2019, and the final \u2018lungs.\u2019 The two lines pulled together in the last sentence I\u2019ve quoted.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve suggested, this is poetry for the Netflix generation and is none the worse for that.\u00a0 Woolard has considerable control in these poems which have a greater surface variety than I have been able to write about here.\u00a0 The visual elements in the poems make them leap off the page even when they pull you into the sometimes sleazy, dissolute worlds of their narrators and characters.\u00a0 Woolard is a very accomplished poet and it will be interesting to see where she goes next.<\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amy Woolard Neck of the Woods, Alice James Books, $16.95 There\u2019s a perky, feisty quality to the writing in Amy Woolard\u2019s debut collection, Neck of the Woods.\u00a0 A glance at a few of the titles of the poems will give some of the overall flavour of the collection: \u2018All Get Out\u2019, \u2018Girl Gets Sick of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nAmy Woolard | Neck of the Woods | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11929\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Amy Woolard | Neck of the Woods | reviewed by Ian Pople - 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