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This is Woodward’s third collection, and like its predecessors that were PBS choices, it thoroughly deserves its commendation.

     The first half of the book explores a typically esoteric range of subjects - from “gurning” to giraffe trapping - and the second half re-tells the myth of the twelve labours carried out by Heracles. Woodward has an anthropologist’s detachment and an infectious love of the bizarre. These combine to feed into a highly original imagery, an ability to tell a story well, a nice sense of irony and a slightly morbid humour. On a visual level his detachment has a Martian effect. In ‘Onion’, his first image knocks the spots off - as it pays tribute to - previous Martian poems on the same subject: “O onion, in/ Slicing you/ I’ve the XXIIIrd// Olympiad. Track/ And field”. On an auditory level, in ‘Precious’, an intriguing and sinister poem about jewel-smuggling by ingestion, a brilliant, elliptical narrative of the days spent dancing in various ballrooms leading up to the arrest of the protagonist’s accomplice, is fit to burst under the wealth of bizarre wordplay revolving around the ridiculous dances: a “cha-cha-cha” is followed by “a white choo-choo”, that leads to “tacos at Chi-Chi’s” and ends, “My tongue had turned blue as a chow-chow”. While on a conceptual level, in ‘In the Museum of Pure Mathematics’, considering sex in the Science Museum, Woodward uses two disparate images to communicate a sense of equivalent sterility: “the couple/ Whose love-making involved/ A thin plastic tube/ Connecting their urethras// And the subsequent exchange/ Of the contents of their bladders/ For up to a dozen times...” is compared with “pi calculated/ To the billionth place”.

     In ‘The Madness of Heracles’, in the second half of the book, although the influence of Redgrove apparent in Woodward’s first book, Householder, is no longer present in the actual diction, something of Redgrove’s thought still seems to linger under the surface. The heroism, which is presented both ironically and yet at the same time so vividly that, at a deep level it has to be in earnest, seems to go beyond the confines of masculinity, striving for connection with a larger feminine principle. Like Anne Carson’s ‘Autobiography of Red’, the poem is full of pizzazz, mixing a contemporary idiom and backdrop with the timeless quality of myth. And Woodward’s striking visual images are suited to the enterprise: (from part V where Heracles has to remove countless ferocious birds from the Stymphalian Marsh): “Deafening. It is a song they/ Keep up only on the wing,/ Their dipping flight, underwriting/ The air like finches will, statements/ Made and emphasised”.

     It’s a wonderful rich book that bears a lot of re-reading.