ames Womack’s latest collection sees the city as both muse and antagonist. A frustrated energy merges with sentiment in poems that feel like a last hurrah to living as we know it. “The city is dead, and yes, the country too, / and probably, beyond, the grey wide world,” he declares in Seasons. Womack, the author of three previous books of poetry, wrote this collection in the shadow of climate crisis and the pandemic, which is why it oozes with anguish.
Womack is an award-winning translator who teaches Spanish and Russian translation at Cambridge University. Thus, the expansivity of language is an ongoing theme, as in The Idyll Replaced By an Unjustifiable Melancholy, in which the narrator describes a picture of a bright Soviet landscape. The English title suggests it’s a picture of a tree, while the Russian version suggests it’s of a field.
In Portrait with Hindsight, an ex-partner haunts everything: scents, doorways, the restaurants he visits with his wife Sometimes there’s a tendency to overexplain, overshare and lean too much on wordplay in a way that can seem meandering and frivolous. A Short Story, about a night in a cheap, hot hotel room, feels overwrought, while a drowsy befuddlement at times overrides the clarity of his poems. On other occasions, however, his eyes feel wide open.
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