With the publication of his first book, HOUSEHOLDER, Gerard Woodward emerged as one of the most talented and unusual new poets of the 1990s. In his forthcoming collection AFTER THE DEAFENING, Woodward's powerful imagination, and the details of everyday life take on an extraordinary and exotic significance. 'A kind of punk anthropologist, his unsettling imagination violates all the thresholds between inner and outer. ' LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS 'Vivid and rarely whimsical' OBSERVER 'There are enough poems in this collection which are both felt AND written to justify Woodward's claim on our attention. Where he exhibits emotional generosity, he is very good indeed. ' Carol Ann Duffy
Gerard Woodward's previous collection, Householder, won him immediate recognition as a poet of immense promise; it received the Somerset Maugham Award and was a Poetry Book Society Choice.
After The Deafening is the realisation of that promise, a book in which common events are enlarged under the lens of the poet's powerful imagination. Each poem begins as an expedition into a familiar world, but the flowers, fruits and insects of that world take on a puzzling, almost supernatural, significance. Gerard Woodward writes the science-fiction of everyday life.
