Patrick Woodcock's ​Farhang: Book Two

Reviewed by D.B.

(ECW Press, 2026)

Farhang: Book Two is a work preoccupied with fracture: fractured memory, fractured geography, fractured identity, even fractured perception itself. Written in Iqaluit, Patrick Woodcock’s eleventh collection gathers experiences from across continents and filters them through the strange clarity and isolation of the Arctic. The poems move through Kurdistan, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Russia, the Amazon, Tanzania, and Nunavut, yet the collection never reads as documentary travel writing. Instead, these locations become states of psychological pressure. Every setting feels weathered by history, loneliness, ecological ruin, or spiritual exhaustion. The figure of Farhang drifts through these environments not as a stable speaker but as a consciousness continually reshaped by what it encounters. It is fitting that the opening movement of the book is titled “Eustress,” because the poems repeatedly examine the way pressure, suffering, and psychological strain alter both perception and identity.

The opening sequence is especially remarkable for the way it constructs Farhang through instability and collapse. After a failed attempt to escape imprisonment by leaping toward an unbarred window, Farhang’s understanding of reality begins to distort. The image of the window itself becomes central to the sequence. What first appears as an opening toward freedom transforms into a watching presence, “an eye—bloodied at / sunset,” looming over him after the fall. Woodcock repeatedly allows objects to mutate in this way throughout the collection. Nothing remains fixed. Injury alters perception, and perception alters the world.

Animals and their methods of seeing dominate another early poem, where belugas, elephants, hippos, ants, and whales observe existence through radically different forms of vision. Farhang, lying wounded beneath these gazes, begins to lose the ability to interpret the world coherently. Blood spreads around him “into a red sundog,” one of many moments where Arctic imagery fuses with bodily suffering. Machines, warfare, and hallucination begin overtaking the poem’s logic until sight itself becomes threatening. Farhang’s struggle is no longer physical survival alone. He is fighting to maintain a stable relationship with perception.

This crisis deepens in the haunting “zombie-spider” sequence. Here, Woodcock turns artistic creation into something parasitic and terrifying. Farhang imagines poems as larvae implanted by moths during sleep, organisms that hollow out the body while feeding upon it. “Each poem is killing you,” he whispers, transforming writing into biological consumption. What is striking about these passages is how they avoid romanticizing madness or creativity. Art in Farhang: Book Two is neither redemptive nor heroic. It is invasive, exhausting, and inseparable from bodily deterioration.

Throughout the collection, Farhang becomes increasingly estranged from ordinary human connection. In one of the book’s most moving poems, photographs no longer register as records of people or events. Farhang notices architecture, borders, textures, skies, and framing devices, but human beings disappear from perception entirely. Crowds become shapes. Lakes become “thicker sky.” A helicopter causes him to mutter, “all is inflatable.” The emotional devastation of the poem lies in this gradual evacuation of intimacy. His screams eventually become “songs to the frames,” as though the edges surrounding memory matter more than memory itself.

Woodcock also fills the book with objects carrying submerged histories. Tiny books hidden throughout city streets, drifting dolls weighted with stones, fragments of graveyards, abandoned skiffs, broken cross finials, and carved bones all appear charged with symbolic pressure. These objects do not clarify the world. They clutter it with unresolved stories and emotional residue. The effect creates a fevered material and landscape, where forgotten things seem more alive than the people handling them. Farhang moves through these environments as though trapped inside a collapsing archive.

The second movement of the collection, “Pareidolia,” expands these concerns outward into geography itself, transforming landscape into a psychological and symbolic field. Environmental devastation, industrial ruin, exile, loneliness, and historical violence become inseparable from the physical spaces the poems inhabit. Whether set in the Kurdish North of Iraq, the rail corridors of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, or the frozen expanses outside Iqaluit, the poems remain bound together through an atmosphere of erosion and endurance.

The poem centred on a poisoned tree in the Kurdish North of Iraq is especially powerful. “The fatigue of the poisoned tree / is visible from the highway,” Woodcock writes, immediately giving the tree an exhausted consciousness. The shadow beneath it creeps “like a torn bedsheet,” while its roots appear to “renounce life.” Perhaps most devastating is the realization that no birds land there any longer. No nests remain. No exhausted creature seeks shelter beneath its branches. By the poem’s conclusion, the tree stands abandoned and stripped of purpose, once believed to “centre the world,” now left alone beneath poisoned air. The poem’s emotional weight comes from its restraint. Woodcock never explains the tragedy directly. He lets absence speak.

Another standout piece, “Harness the ghost of the locomotive’s breath,” carries the reader into Eastern Europe and the Balkans through imagery thick with soot, fog, and contamination. Trains no longer symbolize progress or romance. Their steam becomes spectral, something to ride briefly before vanishing into forests and ruined villages. Snow in the poem is described not as pure but as “full of malice, pollutants, feces.” Even nature has absorbed industrial and political decay. Yet despite the bleakness, the speaker continues waiting for the next train, continuing to prepare “your harness.” There is persistence in these poems, though never optimism. The imagination survives long after certainty has collapsed.

The Arctic poems anchor the emotional atmosphere of the collection. “The Arctic offers endless ways to go blind” is especially powerful in its depiction of walking away from Iqaluit across sea ice toward the flow edge. The poem’s brilliance lies in its treatment of sound. The cracking and popping beneath the ice shift from irritation to nostalgia and finally to dread as the speaker ages within the poem itself. Melt ponds, skidoo trails, frosted goggles, and shifting tidewater become part of an increasingly unstable sensory field. By the final lines, blindness operates both literally and existentially: “This is you / in thirty years—alone, walking without goal.” The Arctic in Farhang: Book Two is never picturesque. It strips away orientation until only endurance remains.

What makes Farhang: Book Two so compelling is the way its disparate geographies gradually merge into one emotional terrain. Kurdistan, Moscow, Lithuania, the Balkans, Tanzania, the Amazon, and Nunavut all seem connected by recurring experiences of erosion, exile, contamination, fatigue, and memory. Woodcock repeatedly returns to images of drifting, burial, fracture, corrosion, and failed escape. Ice behaves like memory. Steam behaves like ghosts. Bridges, windows, photographs, and even trees become unstable thresholds between survival and disappearance.

The collection’s formal restraint strengthens its emotional force. The poems are tightly controlled, yet the imagery often feels feverish and unpredictable. Woodcock possesses a rare ability to move between philosophical reflection and concrete physical detail without sacrificing momentum. A poisoned root system, a helicopter in a photograph, mercury-stained snow, an exhausted narwhal, or a cracked tube window can suddenly open outward into meditations on mortality, displacement, and artistic obsession.

Written entirely in Iqaluit, Farhang: Book Two achieves something unusual in contemporary poetry. It transforms global movement into stillness. The farther the poems travel geographically, the more inward and isolated they become emotionally. Patrick Woodcock has produced a collection filled with unease, intelligence, and haunting imagery, one that examines what prolonged exposure to violence, memory, travel, and solitude does to the human mind. Rather than offering resolution, the book leaves the reader standing inside its drifting weather systems, listening to ice shift beneath unseen depths.

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​D.B. is a poet living in the Republic of Georgia and the author of three self-published collections of poetry. Her most recent book, Alter Our Borders, explores ideas of belonging, memory, distance, and the shifting boundaries between people and places. A lifelong and avid reader of poetry, she has been particularly drawn to writers who combine intimate experience with larger questions of history and identity. She began writing poetry in her early twenties and has continued to develop her work independently. When not writing, she can usually be found reading poetry, discovering new writers, or returning to the collections that first inspired her.