Contents The Dining Room 1 The Schoolroom, Temple House 2 The Hills of Tinnacara 3 Enda's Letter 5 Clooneigh - the meadow of the horses 6 Census 8 The Midnight Returns 10 The Hard Stuff 12 Our Ladies 13 Maggie Philomena 14 War Wedding 15 The '36 Olympics 17 Transfer 19 The Boating Lake 20 Google Streetview 22 The Moon Landing 24 The White Valentine 25 Sweet Heart 26 Risotto 28 Cooking with Elizabeth Craig 29 City of Change and Challenge 31 Lodging 33 Dickins and Jones 2006 34 The V&A: evening dresses 36 Baudelaire, at sea 38 The Sea Deer 40 The Portuguese Storm 41 Cy Twombly's Hero and Leandro 42 Why the English like Jack Vettriano's Singing Butler 43 Autumn at Number Nine 44 The Summer of the Killer Frogs 46 The Empire of Evil 1983 48 Sachsenhausen 49 The Burning Tractor 51 Notes 52
Mary Woodward was born in Hammersmith to Irish and Welsh parents. As a child she lived in bomb-damaged Shepherds Bush, grew up on a council estate in Hertfordshire, and then studied in Liverpool. She has an English degree and a Master's degree for research on William Morris's early poetry from the University of Liverpool. She has worked in the Department of Education, and from 1979 to 2002 as a teacher in a comprehensive school; in 1993 she won the TES Teaching Poetry prize. After teaching HND Fashion students she went on to win the Guardian Jackie Moore Award for Fashion Writing in 2003. In 1993 she won the Poetry Business poetry competition and published Almost like Talking (Smith Doorstep). In 2008 she was awarded a place on a Poetry Trust First Collection seminar at Bruisyard Hall. Her poems have been in many magazines and frequently placed in competitions. She also has published short fiction.
"In this scrupulously unsentimental collection, full of crisp, lucent imagery, the reader is transported to exquisitely rendered physical and emotional landscapes. Fully engaged with the material world, these poems interrogate memory and family mythology to reveal the darkness beneath luminous surfaces. Reading these poems - many of which engage with water - I felt that I was watching dazzling tropical fish dart across a tank." - Catherine Smith "'Aren't there laws against letters as young/as this travelling on their own by air?' asks the poet in 'Enda's Letter'. Missives, communications (including the extraordinary 'The White Valentine', a Valentine like no other), together with a sense of place and history inform these beautifully constructed poems. Almost by stealth, Mary Woodward gives us poems which surprise and reverberate, again and again." - Julian Stannard
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