Patrick Woodcock's Farhang: Book One

Reviewed by Isabel James

(ECW Press, 2023)

*Some insight was gained by listening to: https://farhangbook1.substack.com/

Patrick Woodcock’s new book of poetry, Farhang: Book One, is a monumental effort. Within its five sections and ninety-nine poems, Woodcock moves through fifteen countries where he has either volunteered or worked. Within these countries, he takes us into their skies, clouds, national parks, jungles, rivers and crops; their schools, cemeteries, hospitals and orphanages. From the narrow pathways he descended into the valleys surrounding Arusha, Tanzania to the bottom of the ocean where sharks tear at our internet cables, Woodcock’s poems are intricate stories with a myriad of topics and targets, where even a cornfield can be politicized. The epitome of his ability to use the natural world as an ever-evolving character within this book is Woodcock’s use of clouds.

When writing of a friend who jumped to his death, the sky’s clouds are entangled chutes. At a small concentration camp in the north of Poland the clouds resemble the soft cap panel inside a coffin. Throughout the rest of the book clouds are inspired to let rain elasticize the land, they transform into cats that hack out wooden fish onto the streets of Kurdistan, and they are used to mute the mountains in Arusha. In a poem whose title is the URL for a documentary on two members of the Black Panther Party who befriended Woodcock in Tanzania, Woodcock writes:

​At the end of their dirt road riddled with potvalleys sits
a farm surrounded by barbed wire. Its chimneys send up
clouds of smoke that resemble rationed cotton balls, little
puffs of poverty that return me to the camps in Poland…
                 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPcZ8Zm958M)

​In the poem ‘Mourning by Association’ clouds that are reflected in puddles are personified to
castigate mourners at a funeral:

​                                                     …lipstick stained
     cigarette butts, like little airplanes, sailed
within clouds that passed judgement by moving on.

​In what is one my favourite poems in the book and one that is sadly a more relevant poem today than when Woodcock wrote it, clouds have become mechanized to protect the innocent during warfare:

                             …the clouds that mothered me
                 act as a firewall between children
and the toys flown by foreigners…
                                                                             We bomb
and burn from blue skies now…
                 (I leaned my head upon the window to watch clouds)

​From its beginning to its conclusion, this is a book of poetry fraught with rage over how we treat each other, especially children and the natural world they live within. In the extraordinary “She lifts his nostrils above the waterline,” Woodcock writes about watching a baby hippo being held out of the water as it sleeps on its mother’s snout. After rereading this poem many times, I began to admire not only its form, but the complexity of its message. In the first stanza, when addressing the baby hippo, Woodcock warns that it might end up being eaten and its ivory used for carvings. But the true criticism of the poem does not appear until the beginning of the third stanza:

​But don’t blame the peasants who hunt, eat
and trade your body. They love their babies
as well. It is the rich who have exploited
your pods for years.

​And who are these rich? In the first stanza they are the Disney animators who made the hippos pirouette until they fainted, or the toy-makers who:

broke his elders by demanding they engorge
themselves on plastic marbles while having
     their asses pounded.

​This might seem comical at first, until the second stanza brings the target into focus:

​The children who slept with soft, plush
versions of you are now the evangelicals
and volunteers, arriving monthly to poach
     and plunder other types of schools.

Woodcock has now transformed the moment he is sharing in the Serengeti with a baby hippo into a reflection on what he saw while running the NGO he volunteered for at a government primary school in Arusha.  The same western children who played with toy hippos and watched the animated movie ‘Fantasia’ are now adults who have come to harm their communities. This is not simply a poem about seeing a hippo, it is about income inequality, colonialism and religion. It is also about Western-influenced and -sanctioned homophobia because the presence of western evangelicals in Tanzania is without a doubt one of the reasons homosexuality is still illegal there. This is a topic addressed again in his poem, ‘Goodbye Zanzibar Penal Code 1934.’

Farhang: Book One’s third section once again contains poems more relevant today than at their time of their writing due to the many military conflicts happening around the world, especially in Gaza. In this section entitled “The Yellow Room,” Woodcock writes of visiting the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwanda and being devastated by a small yellow room where they show photos of a handful of children along with their names, ages, a few interesting facts like their favourite toys, and lastly their cause of death. Woodcock’s six poems in this section may overwhelm the reader. The children’s details are mixed within poems that condemn our collective apathy and misuse of technology and resources when those outside of our borders need us the most. What kind of global society lets ‘a good girl,’ ‘daddy’s girls,’ ‘a quiet well-behaved boy’ who loved ‘singing and dancing’ ‘riding a bicycle’ and eating ‘cake’ be slaughtered? Woodcock does not let the reader leave the room without seeing what he did. Their deaths, both sickening and grisly, are printed on the page just as they are on the wall in the memorial. What we choose to do now with this information is up to us, but we can no longer feign lack of knowledge.

Patrick Woodcock’s Farhang: Book One is a spectacular book by a poet whose love for the art and craft of poetry is only matched by his passion for improving our world before his time is up. This is not an entirely dark book; it is also full of light, love, celebration and joy. But at the same time, it is a warning to us, sent by someone who has spent decades out in the world, immersed in different sociopolitical, cultural and geographical landscapes. None of the tragedies that Woodcock addresses had to happen—we are capable of solving all of our most critical issues without harming each other and our planet. But we must care, and we must act. Let reading this incredible book be one part of the act.

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Isabel James is a Scottish-Canadian freelance writer currently dividing her time between Toronto and Edmonton while finishing her first non-fiction book, My library for mice.