Its references to Sylvia Plath and Sharon Olds tell us that this is a so-called ‘confessional’ collection, though it rejects the torment and taboo-breaking of its models: the present of these poems is happy marriage, pride in motherhood, pleasure in sex, enjoyment of career, and love of parents and grandparents. Fair enough: the poets of personal apocalypse are scarce these days, while many contemporaries look out from a such a level headland that they risk being swooped on by the Smug Poem or Boast Poem vultures – or just dying of boredom. One strategy is to direct anger and hurt at the mad outside world in poems about prejudice, poverty or the environment. Another is to look back at a horrendous personal past. A third is to cherry-pick moments of tragedy (bereavement, break-ups, pathosis) in an otherwise grounded life. Anna Woodford’s originality here lies in her aptitude (or desire, or determination) relentlessly to see the ‘Bright Side’, as one title puts it. Teenage, in ‘16/17’, is viewed not via the usual alienation but as opportunity and potential: ‘Newcastle is Annacastle upon Tyne’. A grief poem has the startling line ‘I was not prepared for all the fun we had’. The workaday world is ‘How I love lotsofpeopleinaroom’ [sic] ‘and me coming in/ as the teacher’. Even a poem of parental expiration gets a forceful upbeat twist:
You were flying, Mum. Bloody Great Death
was at every window, jemmying them open
so you could make clean away in your hospital gown
[…] What could I do
but cheer you on – Go Mum! Go for it! […]
Where there are difficulties, the focus is on happy resolution. Two years’ disrupted schooling is sketchily hinted at, but via positive commemorations of a therapist, a private tutor and a music teacher. Poems featuring unsuccessful former relationships frequently recall their good parts. A train crash in which ‘we nearly died’ is remembered as:
[…] for years after we laughed
about the mother locked in the loo, about the man
who sat on Helen’s suitcase and burst it […]
This desire to upend expectations extends even to a Heptonstall Graveyard poem which is (mainly) about a resident other than that one. Nor is this one of those collections that begins with poems about childhood and ends with poems about death. Alert to the structural cliché, it reverses it. The book’s title justifies the re-ordering, but fortunately its sweeping assertion isn’t treated simplistically. History, which here is family history, remains a site of revision. Speaking of an immigrant grandfather, ‘the terrace/ he named Lwów after the home he lost’ had been named ‘Leopolis’ by him in an early poem, and the amendment from the Latin/ Hapsburg name to the Polish one suggests a significant change of perception or loyalty. ‘Everything is present’ is, among other things, also a Buddhist notion. Fans of Changing Room will find fewer shrines and monks this time but it’s certainly arguable that the book’s outlook owes something to the Four Truths.
Stylistically, the free verse demonstrates a deft mix of end-stopping and varied enjambment that bolsters the conversational flavour while regulating the flow. An alertness to sentence-shape suggests that Anna Woodford might also write good prose. A particular feature is the anaphora; above all, the ‘How’ formulation used in many poems:
How Mum cannot open the door enough.
How she grabs our things as if against
a big lit clock. How her pinny is
all frills […]
Not least, there’s the constantly enjoyable phrasing. I liked ‘the bubble of your flat with its solid/ teapot’ and ‘my A++ in grieving’ and ‘Mike and I/ were riding around on my bedroom’s white charger’ among many more. With its thirty-eight pages of poetry, this is a large pamphlet that’s grown a thin spine, but it packs a lot of interest in. Who wants poets to suffer when they can write so well and be happy?
Guy Russell 30th January 2026
