Review: Farhang: Book One by Patrick Woodcock
Farhang: Book One by Patrick Woodcock is a collection of poems that reads like Dante’s journey into the Inferno. Readers will meet children, adults, and others who have faced tragedy, but not everyone lives to tell the tale. Woodcock’s poems do not shy away from gruesome events, but they also do not glorify them. In the initial poems, which read more like prose, Woodcock reminds us that there are “too many walls of names” and that in some cases “Canada’s First Nations had their tongues numbed and their birthright’s melody muted by a church and state who weaponized their alphabet.”
Throughout, the narrator places himself in observance of tragedy, but takes the focus off of himself and places it solely on those who suffer. “This was his salvation, he had to watch what should die, dying.” Woodcock is placing us in these scenes, with these lost souls, even as he reminds us that “armies no longer need clouds to harbour their contempt. We bomb and burn from blue skies now…” Hatred was harder to see somehow, but now it is out in the open — allowed with little protest.
Woodcock draws on his experiences as a writer and volunteer in places torn apart by war or ravaged by political factions. While not exactly chronicling the facts of the time, he is adept at capturing the moment without turning it into something glorious or revered. He strives through his prose-like poems to accurately account for all that has come to pass and never shies away from the ugliness. “Seeds were being planted where they shouldn’t be,” he reminds us. Too often we are rushing headlong into places where we needn’t be, trying to “right wrongs” that are not wrongs to be righted.
Woodcock’s lines are as beautiful as they are devastating: “When we all collide in 10,000 years, our atoms will reassemble in craters to sing of our slipping back from the quiet.” He reminds us that what has occurred in these places will continue to occur even as we strive to stop it — it is inevitable.
One of the most devastating lines for me was in “88. Red roses for Patrick”: “They did not need to cut or clear children; they cannot be harvested or replanted.” The truth of this will sink in your stomach and make you nauseous for all the children we’ve already lost and will likely continue to lose. Farhang: Book One by Patrick Woodcock is a stunning and devastating collection that will make a lasting impression.
RATING: Cinquain
About the Author:
Patrick Woodcock is the author of 10 books of poetry and countless reviews. His work has been translated and published in 14 languages. Since travel is so essential to his work, Mr. Woodcock has lived and worked in such diverse countries as Iceland, Poland, Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, The Sultanate of Oman, Saudi Arabia, Colombia, The Kurdish North of Iraq and Azerbaijan. Within Canada he has travelled from the West to East coasts, as well as working as a volunteer for almost a year with the elders of Fort Good Hope, NT – 20km south of the Arctic Circle.