"Legoland" by Gerard Woodward (Picador, 2016)

• In the first story, "The Family Whistle", a long-lost soldier husband returns to his wife after WW2. But her husband's already returned. Which one's the real one? She prefers the one she's with even though the new one's probably the genuine article. An ok plot, but little development given the length of the piece.
• I like "Union State" though there are too many words towards the end.
• In "A Night Crossing" a guy encounters a stag-party group, and thinks he's missed out on a night with a beautiful women. He end up sleeping in the stag-party's minibus regretting his missed opportunities and wondering what sort of person he is. I like the way the man's portrayed.
• "The Dogs" is a dud.
• "The Face" is a decent idea that nearly comes off.
• "The Fall of Mr and Mrs Nicholson" is fast-paced, with some humour - a writer is involved when a president is overturned and killed.
• "A birthday cockatrice" doesn't work for me.
• "The unloved" is mostly a dud, which puts 60 pages of deadwood in the middle of the book.
• In "Legoland" a man who's lost his memory has the main character's phone number in his pocket, on a playing card - the 3 of hearts. The narrator visits him in hospital, doesn't know him. The narrator's girlfriend Gemma (36 - she lives in another town) gets a heart-shaped tattoo which shocks him. The amnesiac briefly visits, attended by a nurse, suspiciously finds a pack of cards lacking the 3 of hearts, asks to stay for a few days because he doesn't want to stay in hospital. Like several of the other characters in the book, the narrator says yes when he means no. Gemma gets a matching tattoo on her other breast. The amnesiac calls himself Terry. They take him to Legoland because he'd been found walking towards it. They lose him there, and are relieved when they find/remember him again. There's a brief hint that thanks to Legoland the happily childless couple might consider starting a family.
• "Astronomy" - out of the blue a mother of 3 gets her husband a big telescope for his 32nd birthday. In the back garden "When he came to putting his eye to the eyepiece, he felt as gauche and as inadequate as a boy stealing his first kiss" (p.222). He "was astonished at how much of his neighbours' lives was visible, that they conducted them so openly, illuminated and uncurtained" (p.223). The story could have worked with a bit of tweaking.
• "Vice" - not saved by the final paragraph.
• "The Underhouse" - a neat idea that doesn't outstay its welcome
• "Glue" - Dawn (legal secretary - married with 2 daughters) and Lara (her younger sister - lesbian artist) don't meet often although Lara is the godmother of the girls. They fall out, with some help. Another weak piece.
• "The Flag" - A family is struggling to get food now that their country's been invaded. There's a giant funfair in the centre of town where everything is free. I didn't get much from the story's linear trajectory.
• "Neighbours" - a divorced man is asked by his old neighbour, Mrs Bredell, to complain about baboons howling and knocking in the adjoining empty flat. He can't see/hear them, but it's a problem in their city - 3 pages are expended telling us about it. After hearing noises they knock on the door, she with a harmless gun. Young lovers answer the door. The story ends well with the man consoling a shaken Mrs Bredell as a baboon appears at her window.

Several times in these stories I felt that the proportions were wrong - a passage lasted 3 pages instead of 1; a story idea should only have supported a page or two of text, or have been a sub-plot of a longer piece. I liked some aspect of many of the pieces.

Other reviews

• Max Liu (Woodward's writing is accessible but never simple or sentimental ... It's true that not everything works. "The Flag" owes too obvious a debt to Kafka, the depiction of the artist in "Glue" is unconvincing and some shorter stories are forgettable.)
• surreyedit
• Irish news

"The Seacunny" by Gerard Woodward (Picador, 2012)

I think this is a poetry book that's got a chance with non-poetry readers.

"Cow Tipping" is typical of one of his styles, beginning with a stream of images based on observation - cows with "knees locked like a deck chair … all facing the same way/ As though stalled in the middle// Of a pilgrimage … You can walk among them// And feel what it might be like/ To live a thousand times faster// Than your neighbours". The urge to add a punch-line could have been resisted though. "The Seacunny" more linear. "Both Ends of the Island" doesn't work for me.

With "Prezzo" we're back to imagery - "Three babies lift cutlery with arms that don't bend,/ Take a shocking spoonful of their own reflections,/ Then drop them on the floor". Towards the poem's end there's "Now they are selling/ The signs that say 'Closing Down Sale'.// The sulphur of a tiramisu does its slow, tipsy work" - I've heard the sale joke before, and I don't get the use of "sulphur". "Several Uses for a Trampoline" combines observation and imagery for 6 pages. "γ2 Delphini-c - The Cuboid Planet" is fun, but even moreso than previous poems doesn't need the line-breaks.

"I had that dream again" begins "Martin". Martin reels in a robot arm "slightly rusted with a dark// Bling of snails, its hand, three fingers intact,/ Giving, by chance, the diving signal/ For OK". "An Arrow Shower" gets a bit metaphysical about archery - we've all been there.

Some of the later poems aren't so convincing, an exception being "A Poodle Symposium" - a party piece, but good - "in fighting/ Inadvertently perform the death scene from/Swan Lake … They are dogs on sticks, candy floss".

Other reviews

• Kate Kellaway (Guardian)
• Sean O'Brien (Guardian)

"We Were Pedestrians" by Gerard Woodward (Chatto & Windus, 2005)

£9! He has a gift for metaphor and simile - landed parachutists dealing with "the slow/Blubber of their chutes"; "the waggle-dance/Of a small forklift"; a "[toilet] cistern/Refills like an old lady/Pouring tea", and when a saucepan lid is raised, "Everything is stowed, A crowd disappears, blunt Instruments are sleeved". He has good ideas for pieces ("Head", "EcoPoesis"). He can spin out a story ("Elephant"). For all that, I think these strength don't combine often enough, and when they're all absent, there are few language-based features to fall back on.

Yes, there are striking metaphors, but they're set in prose like "The nights were so dark You'd think the sun Was never coming back. I'd sometimes lie in the bed Kept awake by this noise That was probably the central Heating fluttering into life" and "The art of poking the tongue To seal a letter, to fix a stamp, May soon belong with leech-Medicine and the eating Of placentas, to an age Of unhygienic romance." And yes, there are 3 villanelles, though "Dr Profundo" is only saved by "memories came like butterflies/ Across the meadows of my brain". "James" has an abaa rhyme scheme and "North from Reykjavik" has rhyming couplets. Elsewhere the initial caps and the line-breaks that give the text an orderly visual appearance have a detrimental, distracting effect on me. "The Overcoat" for example has some good images, but the format does the content no favours. "The Plume" and "On the corner" are barely poetic, though they're laid out very poetically.

I'm not suggesting that these should be "prose poems", or that all poems should be uniformly imagistic, only that there shouldn't be redundant line-breaks. In other countries writers publish short "texts" or aphorisms that haven't been sliced or bloated to suit another genre. To me, this book's white space is an expensive way of telling the reader to read poetically. In amongst journalism etc, such a ploy might be a necessary cue, but in a homogeneous book what's the problem?