The Vulture

The vulture, the presiding genius of Gerard Woodwards collection, is a sympathetic and awful character who challenges the conceits of home, family, and human culture. Through his subversive strategy, he explores the strange intimacies we share with other life forms, rendering our home the alien planet it is and giving conscious voice to the terrible sense of precariousness that lies just below our waking state.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 128 pages
Publication date: 06 January 2022
Publisher: Pan Macmillan

The vulture, the presiding genius of Gerard Woodwards collection, is at once sympathetic and awful, intimate and other. Woodward naturally positions himself at uncomfortable borders and thresholds, and in doing so alerts us to the flimsiness of the conceits of home, of family, and human culture. Many poets have challenged our lazy habit of addressing nature through the pathetic fallacy; few have had the nerve to consciously embrace it as a subversive strategy, through which we can explore the strange intimacies we share with other life-forms.

The Vulture shows insects and animals and plants invade, infect, and fuse with us at every turn; elsewhere, the architecture of our lives, our houses, gardens, careers, and bodies, are revealed as the provisional drafts they are. No contemporary poet unsettles like Woodward: he does so through no easy surrealism, but instead an extraordinary ability to render our home the alien planet it is, and give conscious voice and vivid shape to the terrible sense of precariousness that lies just below our waking state.

Weight: 198g
Dimension: 196 x 154 x 10 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781529027709