The Seacunny

Gerard Woodward's poetry has long been admired for its sharp and unflinching eye, its fearless surrealism, its blacker-than-black humour, and its ability to find a little abyss in any detail, no matter how innocuous or domestic.

Here, his considerations of trampolines, bird-tables and lightbulbs will leave the reader unable to regard those things in quite the same way again; they will also find science-fiction novels compressed to a few stanzas, strange potted biographies, and lists of edicts from long-dead tyrants.

However, The Seacunny finds this inimitable voice extend itself in new and unexpected directions, with the poet turning to the natural world and to human relationships in ways that are affecting as they are surprising. This is a book of astonishing range, and declares a new lyric direction in Woodward's poetry.

Gerard Woodward was born in London in 1961. He has published several prize-winning collections of poetry as well as four novels including I'll Go to Bed at Noon which was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize. His last collection of poetry, We Were Pedestrians, was shortlisted for the 2005 T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

About Gerard Woodward