Farhang Book One, by Patrick Woodcock

ECW Press, Toronto, Canada September 5th, 2023

Reviewed by Ian Richards

Patrick Woodcock’s new book of poetry, Farhang Book One, is a demanding book, but well worth the effort. Over the span of thirty years, and in this book, fifteen countries, Woodcock celebrates, mourns, eulogizes and rages. Whether he is mourning a friend lost to suicide or celebrating another, dancing in complete abandon, Woodcock’s poems not only capture the moment and myriad of emotions, but like all great poetry, they expand upon it and take it somewhere unique yet still universal. At the end of “Baath’s Members are not Allowed to Enter,” a poem whose title is taken from a sign near the entrance of a cemetery in Halabja, Kurdish North of Iraq, Woodcock asks four questions:

Did you have a brother or sister?

A cow? Did I walk past you in the memorial? Did you cry

when you learned you can’t shoot gas?

These questions are directed toward an unknown child after finding a small toy gun on the ground. The ‘gas’ he is referring to are the chemical weapons dropped on the Kurds living in the city of Halabja on March 16th, 1988. It is a specific image about a specific date, but we can feel the universal weight of it in Woodcock’s poem. It is not simply a poem about one attack, it is a poem about, and for, any child who suffers through such a monstrous and cruel act of warfare. This is why Farhang Book One succeeds so well. If it was a book of fiction written by someone in the safety of their house it would be of little value. But it is not. It was written by a poet who moved out of his country to engage with others around the world for years. He befriended and listened to them while teaching and volunteering and then wrote to honour them in the hope that others like them would not have to be honoured like this again.

Dived into 5 sections, Farhang Book One, contains 103 poems in a variety of styles. After the eight concrete blocks of section one’s ‘Monoliths,’ the book opens its lines and stanzas to a variety of lengths and shapes. The only stylistic constraint within the book is that each poem can only be 28 lines long. If an extra line was needed Woodcock made the title the first line of the poem. The more you read this book, the more you see the effort placed not only in its content and style, but its presentation. How does the poems look on the page? Quite a few poems have their shape dictated by the content of the poem and one poem about two members of the Black Panther Party who Woodcock befriended in Arusha, Tanzania, uses the YouTube link to a documentary about them as its title.

In section two “Pharmakoi and Filaments” there are many subtle nods to his craft within the poems. Who else but a poet would describe a roof using prosodic terminology as he does in a poem about visiting Halldor Laxness’s house in Iceland:

I didn’t

climb onto your roof to rejoice within

the lonely choriamb of its chimneys…

In the poem “Crawl” a man struggles to pull himself along the side of a road in Kenya. His struggle and desperation can be felt by the strong stresses that move from five to four then three with each line. This repeats for most of the poem only to end in an anarchic mix to hint at the man’s weakening state. The shifting rhythm of the line mirrors the struggles of the man, on his stomach, pulling himself toward a petrol station. This is one of the finest poems in a book full of standouts. It is anguished verse, full of beauty and desperation. After listing the items the man has been pulling himself over Woodcock moves the poem away from reality and into his dreams:

Some flashed like little Christmas lights

after they nicked and cut those legs entwined

like braided hair. I dreamt that he

was an ornament, crawling

back to the tree. Just a head, shoulders and arms

finding his way home.

To be hung. To be left hanging.

Section two is the longest sections of the book, containing 83 poems, and is a stunning testament to how much work Woodcock put into both form and content.

Section three is a wall thrown in front of whatever pace you may have created as a reader up to this point. It contains six poems about his visit to the Kigali Genocide Memorial. No one entering such a site would think it would be a pleasant visit, but “The Yellow Room” seems to have caught Woodcock off-guard, and this is a poet who has already written about concentration camps in Poland, mined fields in Bosnia and Herzegovina and memorials to chemical attacks. In this room, photos of smiling children have been enlarged and placed above plaques that state six facts about the child. From age, to their favourite food and toy, the first five points paint the picture of a loved and happy child, but the sixth and final point is always “Cause of Death.” The five children written about died in horrific ways and Woodcock does not let us leave the room without seeing what he saw. It is appalling and infuriating. Woodcock’s poem in this section rage and weep for them. In one of his most moving endings, Woodcock writes about our lack of progress when it comes to the suffering of children as we land a helicopter on Mars, 27 years after these young girls perished in their shower at home:

Did you see them sail to the god of war?

Did you see little Ginny hover and land?

Is the red the same red from shower to soil?

Is the red planet red for we bled their girls first?

Section four, “Home is everywhere but where you stand” is a single poem about Woodcock standing in a lake in Canada and watching the trees move on the other side of it. This movement triggers horrific memories of what his Kurdish friends and colleagues have gone through. When dragonflies arrive and awaken Woodcock from his daydreams, he once again finds himself in need of escape. In an attempt to hide from them and muffle his memories, Woodcock lowers himself beneath the water. But it seems even when underwater he cannot find peace:

I was roused by a swarm of dragonflies tapping the lake,

sending messages of concern by Morse code. A mating

couple struck the water with such might that I felt I was

in outer space observing an atomic bomb’s detonation.

I lowered myself to mute it and slow my heart. But they

kept tapping and tapping and tapping.

I can picture Woodcock looking up, holding his breath, now stuck within the popping and cracking Russian television he had compared the lake to earlier in the poem.

The fifth and final section, ‘Amiikkiqtainagaa’ (Paulatuk journal fragments), is far removed from the previous four sections. Woodcock creates five poems within the borders of ten Inuvialuktun words. Paulatuk is a small hamlet of roughly 300 Inuvialuit where Woodcock volunteered for two years. It was here that he completed Farhang Book One and began Farhang Book Two. It must have been jarring to have moved from Arusha, Tanzania where he also volunteered for two years to the freezing, treeless and rugged landscape of Canada’s arctic. But it was because of Paulatuk’s land that Woodcock was finally able to address the myriad of injustices he has seen. He would sit and stare out at the arctic’s clean sheet of paper and let his words arrive on the ice or fall from the sky:

Thousands will

end here. The orphan makers, the oven

runners, the widower widowing others

and the death-delighting hell-reachers.

I will douse dawn’s palette in petrol,

burn them to ash on the ice.

What follows are five pages of observations that act like the books epilogue, all written while living on a land whose winds were capable of freezing his eyes shut and tossing caribou heads past his front window. Paulatuk was where Woodcock had to accept that his memories were like the garbage at the town’s dump that will never disappear due to the permafrost and the hamlet’s remote location:

But like the garbage here,

I am forced to accept nothing ever goes

underground or gets barged away…

Farhang Book One is a dark book. But this is not imagined darkness, this is what Woodcock has seen first-hand while working and volunteering abroad. The sadness he writes of is the sadness he has seen or listened to in the stories of those he engaged with. There are indeed moments of levity in the book, “The saddest toilet” and a few others are hilarious, but for most of the journey the reader makes within these pages, Woodcock is calling out and raging against all of our reckless stupidities, our racism, homophobia and the omnipresent xenophobia of both people and politicians that has led to such poverty and disparity in the world. In the end, this is a book of poetry, one that should be admired not only for its content and message, but also for the respect and unique form in which its subjects are presented. While I eagerly await Farhang Book Two, which I’ve learned is only about the natural world and has no direct mention of humankind in it, I will continue to sit and unravel this gem of a book and all it has to offer.