Don’t be fooled by the slightness of this pamphlet. It’s Tardis-like, DeLorean-like; it breaches time and space, sight and sound, elegy and epiphany. Step into it and you’re like likely to think you’ve been plunged into the lightless, nihilistic abyss of a dead-end youth in a dead-end town in the 1990s. And indeed you have, but such is the power of Jamie Woods’s creative and poetic energy that he crams in so much more.
His poems, interestingly varied in form and tone, coalesce to tell the story of one person’s desperate search for drug-facilitated oblivion on one hand and love’s home-coming and validation on the other. This living paradox, openly explored by Woods in an autobiographical frame, is punchy in its rawness and honesty. The lows are emotionally crushing, as in "You and No-one Else" and "Pavement Kenickie Bedsit 99," so too, are the numerous failed pharmaceutical highs where the yearned-for acme of revelation or ascension (the poems ring with religious, Christian imagery) is never achieved. However, for me, the pamphlet’s beating heart lies in "The Opposite of Spring," a beautifully rendered moment of loss which, within the ordering of the pamphlet, might intuit a hesitant uptick in life trajectory.
What makes this pamphlet eminently absorbing, and more than usually engaging, is its almost synaesthetic appeal to the senses. Woods, a musician and lyric writer, has included a song title for each poem, accessible via his website, and also visuals: graphically-designed poems are interspersed to strong effect, and several poems have ekphrastic origins. These intriguing, extended dynamics offer a dense web of intersensory connections within and beyond the pamphlet’s pages. Immerse yourself in the enriching and persuasive hinterlands Woods so generously offers. Rewind time. I would never have known Hole’s mind-blowing "Northern Star" without him.
Claire Cox was co-founder and Associate Editor of ignitionpress, winner of the 2021 Michael Marks Publishers’ Award. She has a PhD (Royal Holloway) on poetry and disaster. Her poems have appeared in Primers: Volume Five and other magazines and anthologies. Claire was also the winner of the 2020 Wigtown Alastair Reid Pamphlet Prize.
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