The individual and the collective, James W. Wood's Building a Kingdom

James W. Wood’s New and Selected Poems 1989-2019, titled Building a Kingdom (The High Window Press, 2019), is shot through with hard-earned awareness, as befits a book that’s been thirty years in the making.

This awareness is first expressed through Wood’s technical knowledge. It’s never flaunted but is always present in his formal rigour, in his control of line and stanza and his sure-footed musicality.

Moreover, the same awareness is a key, unifying, implicit theme throughout Building a Kingdom. It’s explored in several ways such as the changing role of the individual in family relationships. The following extract from The Parting portrays one such generational shift with aplomb:

…Looking down at the cobbled road

where I walk, do you see

what I saw when my father

rushed off to work thirty years ago?

You’ve learned to wave a wobbly hand

so I return the gesture just as

my father, past working, waved to me,

framed stern and proud in my window.

Later that same day, we walk together

up and down our carpeted corridor. You falter

and my arms fly out: have I caught you

the way I caught your grandfather

falling in the final days

before his death…?

These lines are remarkable in many ways, from the gorgeous stanza break of You falter/and my arms fly out to the unexpected but then inevitable leap that places a grandfather in the same role as a grandson.

And then there’s Wood’s capacity for placing the individual in a wider family history that consequently reaches out beyond the specific family in question. The opening lines to Dropping provide us with an excellent example:

I spark up my saw, pull down the mask. My people

been felling timber since 1860, every man

never living much past forty, when most

passed on to our Lord from disease…

This poem places the individual not only within the context of their people (sic) but also in the passing of time via a nod towards new technology in the face of traditions.

All of the above combines in Building a Kingdom with pieces that focus on other characters, again homing in on the role of the individual, playing it off against the collective, as in the closing lines of Self-Help…

…Then those last few hours every Sunday –

some more wine, a book, and her sat quietly

listening to the motorway’s distant song

that echoed through her, something lost and wronged.

In this extract, Wood invites the reader to contrast the individual protagonist’s isolation with the collective noise of cars from the motorway. At first glance, Self-Help might seem light years away from Dropping and The Parting in its thematic concerns. However, as indicated above, the opposite is true.

Building a Kingdom brings us a poet in full maturity with a coherent world view that he expresses in varied ways but always with artistic craft. Get hold of a copy and this book will provide you with many hours of reading pleasure and reflection: never has our personal role in society been so important.