An Ordinary Dog is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision to bear sceptical witness to - what? As much to the touching ordinariness of human needs as to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about desire: sacred and profane, frantic and serene, refined and grubby. Often traduced by cussedness and always complicated by external events, desire is here constructed less in the present than in anticipation and memory; loss is resistant to the balm of forgetting. An Ordinary Dog returns repeatedly to those times of crisis when history is lived and reinvented, when myth degenerates into faith, reason falters. The poems' moods veer between cheerful equanimity and desperation; their focus between detachment and intimate involvement. In the end, as events take their course, it is always chance that prevails.

About the Author
Gregory Woods was born in Egypt in 1953 and grew up in Ghana. Since 1998 he has been Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University (the first such appointment in the UK). Woods has published four previous poetry collectons (all with Carcanet), most recently Quidnunc (2007). He is also the author of several critical books, including Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern poetry (Yale 1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (Yale, 1998).


Book Information
ISBN 9781847770783
Author Gregory Woods
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Carcanet Press Ltd
Publisher Carcanet Press Ltd
Weight(grams) 295g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 135mm * 13mm