Music from the Big Tent

Music From The Big Tent is Macdara Woods' first volume of new poems since Collected Poems (2012). From the opening poem in which a bird falls dead at the feet of the strolling poet and his son, to the closing which references the well-known song 'The Night Before Larry Was Stretched', in this latest collection of his poems Macdara Woods looks, with un inching eye, beyond the certainties and consolations of the here and now. In a book which charts his own recent ill health and recovery, he celebrates "the courage and / The wonder / Of the naked body," not least at a time "when the nanciers / have poisoned all the blood banks / and the drug companies / have rendered us venomous." Though his subjects may be illness, frailty and dissolution, the insistence on witness and clear-eyed expression animates these poems with a de ant and by times almost exhuberant energy. Poems such as 'Big- Top Music' and 'A May-Day Aisling Skazka' ("Here's where the rhythm in the rhyme / Turns slower (as will yours in time)" tap in to a long tradition of playful music imparting dark visions, and add a new and captivating dimension to Woods' ongoing dance in words and 'In the open space between / The words."