Critical Commentary
Poetry Review (A Small Grace) - Padma Thornlyre
“This industrialized inhuman civilization of ours has made our minds cruel and has withered our hearts. It has made men into scientific barbarians.” So wrote Nikos Kanzantzakis, in Spain, fifty years ago. Look around: we routinely genuflect to new technologies and measure civilization not by cultural accomplishments but by the deployment of economic and military might to bend nature and history toward self-serving ends. That poetry, the most humanizing of arts, has fallen from public favor should surprise no one; that it is the most necessary of arts against a backdrop of terrorism, global warming, oil wars and the concentration of wealth and power into increasingly fewer hands becomes apparent when reading the poetry of Phil Woods. An imposing physical presence, Woods teaches history at an alternative high school in Denver. A Small Grace is his fourth book.
When Woods writes of nature, a simple experience is rendered luminous: “orange water jug/in morning sun//the wasps/keep thinking//it’s a flower.” A scholar less gentlemanly than manly, he gruffly instructs us that “Tannins contort taste buds./In old Breton tann meant/oak tree & oak trees/were worshipped.” Nature is holy, and Woods quotes from the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas: “The Kingdom of the Father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it.” Woods insists we take the blinders off.
Outrage and despair from Woods the historian: “They spit on McGovern in ’72;/35 missions over Europe &/they chose Tricky Dicky.” He recalls the massacre at Colorado’s Ludlow mines, ordered by “philanthropist” John D. Rockerfeller: “that ruthless bastard/squeezed blood and sweat/onto/every dime/he gave away.”
A Small Grace implores us to wake up, open our eyes and be truthful about what we see; to trust our own well-informed judgment; to heed our own receptive heart. And to call to task those whose greed and power would dehumanize those of us not motivated by such bizarre lusts. Woods is not the bully on the block; rather, he stares the bully down, saying, “I know you. And I am not less than you.”
Poetry Review (A Small Grace) - Eric Walter
Eric Walter, author of The Logic of Broken Country, says A Small Grace “is an engagingly personable collection befitting a man who is a teacher of history, student of Zen, and angler for truth. Herein are poems of poignant fact and revealing emotion – soul-baring riffs on the haunting complexity of human interaction; powerful testimonies against the poisons of greed and self-interest; epiphanic meditations on the healing rhythms of nature." A Small Grace is Phil Woods’ fourth book of poems.
