Records of an Incitement to Silence

Gregory Woods, Records of an Incitement to Silence (Manchester: Carcanet, 2021)

Longlisted for the Polari Prize 2022

Rory Waterman:

“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.”

Robert Hamberger:

“There is such authority in Woods’s poems: the lyrical resignation of his rhythms, the music of experience in his voice […] 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 […] 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.”

Neil Fulwood, The High Window (Winter 2021):

“Woods’s conjurations are elliptical, smokily atmospheric; cinematic if one takes Resnais, Robbe-Grillet and perhaps Costa-Gavras as one’s touchstone. … [By the end of the book] the mysteries and cadences and images and dreamlike fragments of Records of an Incitement to Silence will have set the blood insistently drumming in the reader’s temples. It will have stimulated and dazzled them and left the door open for them to return to a cityscape and mindscape unique in contemporary British poetry.”

Matt Nunn, Everybody’s Reviewing (27 October 2021):

“These poems are tuned and primed with a certain knowledge that they sail with full stateliness and grace towards their final destination, immaculate and exact. 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 or sentiment.”

Chris Beckett, London Grip (January 2022):

“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 […] This is a collection that I will be dipping into, pondering, enjoying, and learning from, for a very long time to come.”

Ira Lightman:

“One of the best poetry books of the year.”