Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    An Ordinary Dog
    An Ordinary Dog
    An Ordinary Dog
    Ebook165 pages1 hour

    An Ordinary Dog

    By Gregory Woods

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Both intimate and detached, this poetry compilation delves into the politics and aesthetics of desire—sacred and profane, frantic and serene, refined and grubby. Reflecting upon the comedy of human needs and the vanity of human wishes, these poems consider times of crisis when history is lived and reinvented, myth degenerates into faith, and reason falters. On this journey in which chance always prevails, the mood ranges from cheerful equanimity to gloomy desperation.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateJul 1, 2011
    ISBN9781847779137
    An Ordinary Dog
    Author

    Gregory Woods

    Gregory Woods was born in Egypt in 1953, and brought up in Ghana. He is the author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. His essay collection The Myth of the Last Taboo: Queer Subcultural Studies was published by Trent Editions (2016). In addition to his six main poetry collections, all with Carcanet, chapbooks of his have been published by Shoestring Press and Sow's Ear Press. Woods has two doctorates from the University of East Anglia (1983, 2006). He began his teaching career at the University of Salerno in 1980. In 1998 he became the first Professor of Gay & Lesbian Studies in the UK, at Nottingham Trent University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is a Founding Fellow of the English Association and has held two Hawthornden Fellowships (1999, 2008).

    Related to An Ordinary Dog

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      The Inventions of Witches

      Oct 30, 2017

      The Inventions of Witches
      7 min read

    • Article

      The Final Truth

      Jan 21, 2020

      The Final Truth
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Time for Art Is Now

      Mar 22, 2018

      The Time for Art Is Now
      4 min read

    • Article

      Morbidity & the Miniature

      May 11, 2018

      Morbidity & the Miniature
      14 min read

    • Article

      The Plague Legends

      Dec 1, 2021

      The Plague Legends
      12 min read

    • Article

      Processing The Pandemic

      Oct 7, 2021

      Processing The Pandemic
      4 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium On The Mysterious

      Sep 1, 2023

      A Symposium On The Mysterious
      24 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all e

      4 min read

    • Article

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD

      Mar 22, 2023

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD
      7 min read

    • Article

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • Article

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD

      Mar 22, 2023

      SHORT STORY by MARGARET ATWOOD
      7 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      May 1, 2022

      —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting hi

      3 min read

    • Article

      Books

      Jul 31, 2023

      Books
      6 min read

    • Article

      A Farewell to Summer

      Aug 29, 2019

      A Farewell to Summer
      6 min read

    • Article

      Spell

      Apr 25, 2018

      Spell
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Myth Of Sisyphus

      Aug 10, 2020

      The Myth Of Sisyphus
      10 min read

    • Article

      A Symposium on Desire

      Sep 1, 2019

      A Symposium on Desire
      23 min read

    • Article

      Fragrant

      Jan 18, 2022

      Fragrant
      5 min read

    • Article

      Wisdom for The Future

      Dec 20, 2021

      Wisdom for The Future
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Essay On Faith

      May 1, 2022

      exordium While sound and seaworthy, I confess a life of false confessions, false hearts, ample contempt for bench warrants charging me with failures to appear. Let what interest death’s elbow grease won’t erase compound, judgments sealed in my ova, m

      4 min read

    • Article

      Water Believes What We Cannot

      Nov 1, 2020

      I wrote this love letter in the spring, when there was pandemic, which was news, and weather, which was not. Now pandemic has been superseded by police brutality, the American presidential election, and wildfires. The unknowns, the unknowable, accumu

      19 min read

    • Article

      When The Refuge Goes Awry

      Sep 1, 2023

      Books Vexations by Annelyse Gelman University of Chicago Press, Phoenix Poets, 2023 paperback, 56 pages, $18.00 Maybe the world should end as it began, in verse recited by a poet. Homer in a folding chair staring blindly at the sea, Troy’s towers bur

      4 min read

    • Article

      100-WORD-STORY COMPETITION Winners

      Aug 16, 2022

      We’ve been delighted by the huge response to our 100-word-story competition. The entries have flooded in thick and fast during the past few months, but while we’ve enjoyed reading every story, only a few can come out on top! You, our readers, voted t

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for An Ordinary Dog

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      An Ordinary Dog - Gregory Woods

      GREGORY WOODS

      An Ordinary Dog

      Acknowledgements

      Earlier versions of these poems appeared in the journals Ganymede, Gay and Lesbian Review, PN Review, Poetry Salzburg Review, Polari Journal and Staple, as well as in the following anthologies: Amie M. Evans and Trebor Healey (eds.), Queer and Catholic (New York: Routledge, 2008), Jo Harding and Theresa Robson (eds.), Slip Through the Silence: Facing Adversity with Verse (Clitheroe: Clitheroe Books, 2008), Kapow: New Writing with Impact (Nottingham: Launderette, 2009), Gregory A. Kompes (ed.), The Queer Collection (Las Vegas: Fabulist Flash, 2007), Reflections: A Collection of Poetry for the Waiting Room (Derby: Reflections, 2007). ‘Echo’s Echoes’ was first publshed on Twitter. I was awarded a second Hawthornden Fellowship in 2008.

      Contents

      Title Page

      Acknowledgements

      One

      Invocation

      Figure of Enchantment

      Objective Disorder

      Age of Gold

      Landscape/Portrait

      The Best Medicine

      Faith Figure

      Scenes from Stendhal

      Scenes from Flaubert

      Wing Three-Quarter

      La Vie en Rose

      Strokes

      Action and Reaction

      Initiation

      Ah the Taste of a Stranger’s Mouth!

      The Picture with the Bear

      Figure with No Past

      Figure of Achievement

      Messages

      Trees or Fly-Fishing

      When You Go

      Scenes from Gautier

      The Sweet Life

      Last Resorts

      Figure of Opportunity

      End of Eternity

      Two

      Jerome

      Into Battle

      Newton at Woolsthorpe

      Interpreting Flaubert

      Death of Rimbaud

      Jean Genet in Norwich

      Lenin on the Thérémin

      E.M. Forster at Rockingham

      His Philosopher’s Voice

      To the Authorities

      Preoccupations

      Torso

      In Derby Cathedral

      On Derby Station

      Drive-By

      Mothers of Sons

      Priorities

      Indictment

      Three

      Penmanship

      First Rites

      The Thaw

      Chance Discoveries

      A Place on the Map

      Boulders

      Said and Done

      Rhapsodic Materialism

      Dream of the Future

      Making Myth

      Possibilities

      A Personal Vergil

      Beyond Progress

      Intersection

      The Vulnerable Bead

      Anomaly

      Displacement

      That Sweet

      Narrative Poem

      Rags, a Dog, Eternal People

      Gogol’s Guilt Complex

      Scenes from Balzac

      Echo’s Echoes

      Four

      An Ordinary Dog

      Theorem

      Her Hair Is her Religion

      Retribution

      Down to Earth

      Extinguishing

      Scenes from Hugo

      Empty Quarter

      Written After Swimming from There to Here

      The Lesson of History

      Around the Neck

      Butter-and-Eggs

      About the Author

      Also by Gregory Woods from Carcanet Press

      Copyright

      One

      Invocation

      Come, hungry Muses, sink your fangs

      into the rancid meat of things.

      Give us another of those songs

      that fizz the spittle on your tongues.

      Descend on us in raucous gangs,

      tattooed and sporting nipple rings.

      Evacuate those tarry lungs

      and goad us with your humour’s prongs.

      Conciliate your hunger pangs

      with scraps of life, the random slings

      and arrows felt by human throngs.

      Foregather where the tyrant hangs,

      and harry anyone who brings

      to human rights inhuman wrongs.

      Figure of Enchantment

      She wears red feathers

      but white ones on feast days

      and on her birthday scales.

      Her fingers have claws

      and black talons for shoplifting.

      When she swims she grows fins

      and on the verge of drowning gills.

      In her rump she hides a sting

      for any man who crosses her,

      but the stinging tastes of honey

      just before it hurts.

      The feathers she wears

      are as red as her hair

      and when anybody plucks them

      she shrieks as if winning a prize.

      Her annual ovulations

      bring the kids out on the streets,

      maidens waving bunches of mimosa

      and square-bashing boys

      with badges and berets.

      By night she hides from headlights

      as if running from the law.

      When it snows she weeps for all mankind

      (a colander) incontinently, out of earshot.

      Those who fall in love with her

      fall out again with broken hearts

      and grazed extremities.

      Nobody comes close. 

      Objective Disorder

      Propriety once segregated us from girls,

      and passion followed suit. No laws or papal bulls

      applied to adolescent guile within these walls.

      For all that we were rendered regular by bells,

      each body’s pulse subordinated to the school’s,

      mortality’s unsentimental chisel gnarls

      a boy’s credulity, and scepticism kills

      his faith. The gods he worships then are human pals,

      imperfect but more beautiful than bloodless souls.

      Beneath a plaster Virgin’s blindness, like a doll’s,

      a pair of us replace cold prayer with spattered vowels

      of inarticulate delight. Each of us feels

      himself, unlike the sheets our ecstasy defiles,

      unspoilt by the division of our bodies’ spoils.

      Age of Gold

      Philosophy relied on words for its account

      of love, but boys did well enough with groan and grunt.

      Theirs was a class of flesh so laudable, by dint

      of youth, that nothing but its semen should anoint.

      Once they had passed beyond the point of do and don’t,

      they were held back by nothing worse than can and can’t.

      Pragmatic passion knew no more severe restraint

      than the available, the possible – and want.

      Besides, the cornucopia was never spent.

      Landscape/Portrait

      Devise a composition, taking in

      the landscape, either as it stands or else

      adjusting it to suit a preconceived

      idea of how it might have looked if you

      could see it from a higher vantage point,

      or if a certain crag or tree were to

      be shifted left or right, and when you point

      your predatory telescope at it,

      like some conquistador confronted by

      the confirmation of a hunch that brought

      him to the distant beach on which he must

      find gold or die for having cost the crown

      more than it takes to raise an army to

      suppress a rebel province – take your time;

      enjoy the passive scene as much as it

      appears to be enjoying being seen.

      Like a boy’s body waiting to be kissed,

      impatient for the tickle of the lips

      or self-indulgent slaver of the tongue,

      the sweep of him exposed across the broad

      horizon of an unmade bed and crudely

      sun-lit underneath the open window,

      but hoarding shadow and a secret heat

      in inaccessible but dreamt-of parts

      unmapped by naked eye, still less explored

      by stealth of

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1