An Ordinary Dog

By Gregory Woods

An Ordinary Dog is a carnival of clashing forms and tones, all deployed with a cool wit and technical precision. They bear sceptical witness to - what? To the affecting ordinariness of human needs, to the vanity of human wishes. Woods writes about desire: sacred and profane, serene and frantic, refined and grubby - often betrayed by cussedness, always complicated by external events. Looking back to times of crisis when history is endured and re-invented, An Ordinary Dog explores where myth degenerates into faith and reason falters. The mood veers between equanimity and desperation; the focus between detachment and intimate involvement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Jun 30, 2011
• ISBN: 9781847779137

Gregory Woods

Gregory Woods was born in Egypt in 1953, and brought up in Ghana. He is the author of Articulate Flesh: Male Homoeroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. His essay collection The Myth of the Last Taboo: Queer Subcultural Studies was published by Trent Editions (2016). In addition to his six main poetry collections, all with Carcanet, chapbooks of his have been published by Shoestring Press and Sow's Ear Press. Woods has two doctorates from the University of East Anglia (1983, 2006). He began his teaching career at the University of Salerno in 1980. In 1998 he became the first Professor of Gay & Lesbian Studies in the UK, at Nottingham Trent University, where he is now Professor Emeritus. He is a Founding Fellow of the English Association and has held two Hawthornden Fellowships (1999, 2008).