Grief Tracks by Bruce Woodcock
Bruce Woodcock’s latest book is a new collection of poems called ‘Grief Works’ (Legal Highs Press paperback or Kindle). It is a searingly honest and direct expression of ambiguous loss in the face of the enforced separation inflicted by long-term illness and nursing needs.
Bruce Woodcock’s latest book is a new collection of poems called ‘Grief Works’ (Legal Highs Press paperback or Kindle). It is a searingly honest and direct expression of ambiguous loss in the face of the enforced separation inflicted by long-term illness and nursing needs.
Bruce Woodcock’s latest book is a new collection of poems called ‘Grief Works’ (Legal Highs Press paperback or Kindle). It is a searingly honest and direct expression of ambiguous loss in the face of the enforced separation inflicted by long-term illness and nursing needs.
We are used to the concept of mourning the deceased, much less so grieving for the living. Bruce Woodcock’s collection Grief Tracks (LegalHighsPress) maps the queer bereavement experienced by anyone nursing a loved one in terminal decline. What is being mourned is the loss of the beloved as he or she once was, and, therefore, the loss of one’s relationship to that person. The agonizing transition from lover to carer has never been better documented. The way the poems disintegrate across the book’s arc is especially heart-rending, the descent into fragmentary forms enacting physical and emotional disintegration. Ernest Hemingway said, ‘If two people love each other, there can be no happy end to it’. Grief Tracks gives that truth a radical twist.
John Osborne, The Big Issue, November 2019