Reviews for Always Die Before Your Mother:
“With an astounding breadth of vision, Canadian author Patrick Woodcock’s latest release, Always Die Before Your Mother, offers a travelogue of verses from locations around the world that could only have been written in our time. . . . From locations as far-flung as the turbulent Arabian Peninsula to the rain forests of South American, he sends copy which provides soul-filled and heart-wrenching accounts of life outside the bubble of our everyday lives.”— Scene Magazine
“‘Please, mother’ he writes, ‘let one of the dolphins circling me be you./ Just exist with me here.’ It is a poignant and a moving plea, and is, in fact, what Woodcock as poet does with the people and the places he presents in this collection: He exists, briefly, poetically, with them. In so doing, he bears witness to their struggles and finds perspective on his own.”— Globe and Mail
“Woodcock exhibits a feel for both closed and open forms and mixes them effectively. He also makes good use of recurring themes and builds a layered structure that is neither obvious nor, in the end, obtuse. It’s a heavy book for sure, but so good and heartfelt that it’s well worth the trip.” — Broken Pencil
“Death and mourning give focus to the notoriously tricky subject of travel writing as the poet has crafted a detailed compendium of how death is spoken of around the world.” — Eye Weekly
“Some of the poems, such as ‘Dogs Fashioned Out of Rust,’ evoke the rhythms and spirituality of T.S. Eliot — that is, if the unadventurous, expat American had ever been brave enough to roam the world as a war correspondent . . . Many of the poems strike like grenades, and after awhile you become afraid — in a good way — to read them, wary of what vision of violence and destruction might lie ahead.” — Vue Weekly
Reviews for Echo Gods and Silent Mountains:
“Patrick Woodcock has sent back a document from his time in Kurdish Iraq. His adventurous Echo Gods and Silent Mountains is a noisy, conflicted affair, unwilling to sacrifice complexity for theme. Woodcock flirts with various traditions, including folk song, prophecy and debate, while his formal preferences involve spacey caesuras, refrains and the kind of self-aware rhyme you see coming from the line’s first syllable . . . [Echo Gods and Silent Mountains] becomes a wild, insidious journal, reminiscent of Dionne Brand’s Griffin-winning Ossuaries, with its wounded morality and its chugging, unstoppable, rhythms.” — Globe and Mail
“Patrick Woodcock, borrows the voice of the Kurds, does not distance himself, does not judge, does not analyze. . . . Echo Gods and Silent Mountains, in this reader’s opinion, is the best book ever written on Kurds: unique in both form and content. The book is a proof of Woodcock’s exceptional ability to commiserate with a nation invisible to the rest of the world; he becomes a Kurd, feels the plight, and carries the weight of a century of massacre, of endless pain. Woodcock is a genuine voice.” — The Kurdistan Tribune
“Echo Gods and Silent Mountains is a heavy book but not a bleak one; Woodcock has a talent for locating the undiminished human spirit and should be praised for his skilled and insightful treatment of such complex subject matter.” — Arc Poetry Magazine
“Woodcock’s evocative poetry offers a glimpse into people engaged in the process of rebuilding themselves, and the conflicts that inevitably arise. This is an excellent collection, and I look forward to reading the next two books as they’re published.” —Broken Pencil
“Through its amalgamation of voices, forms, and ideas, and through its earnest craft and composite apostrophe, Echo Gods and Silent Mountains refuses the reduction to the simple and delivers the excitement of the several.” — Cutbank Online
Reviews for You can’t bury them all
“Woodcock’s collection celebrates humanity’s strength and perseverance in the face of ceaseless adversity.” — Quill & Quire
“In spite of the suffering he records in his poems, many of the scenes Woodcock describes are so magically, touchingly beautiful that they force you to stop and breathe slowly, to become fully aware of the significance of what you’re seeing.” — The Voice Magazine
“You can’t bury them all is as compassionate and sincere as it is perceptive, and Woodcock’s vision of a battered but undefeated human spirit in the midst of recurring misery does well to unearth the injustices to which he speaks.” — The Bull Calf
“This collection will actually tear your heart apart even more than the election results did, before helping you put it back together again.” — Bustle
“Each poem stands on its own in Patrick Woodcock’s You can’t bury them all, but what’s perhaps most interesting is how they work together. . . His verses evoke a sort of in-the-moment understanding — you feel, as the reader, that you see exactly what he’s seeing and react to the scene in the same way he did.” — Up Here
“Woodcock is a traveler and, more importantly, an observer of other cultures. If a reader picks up any of these three sections, the third being Azerbaijan, he or she would be hard-pressed to realize that the author is not a life long resident of that region. It is difficult to capture one’s own culture in poetry but to capture three so perfectly is amazing . . . This is the magic that poetry hopes to obtain — To take the reader to a place and visit the historical and personal aspects of events, people, and culture and not realizing the poet is creating everything. A true virtual reality.” — Evil Cyclist Blog
“The collection confronts the borders, races, religions and whatever else manages to isolate human from human while exploring and bringing into focus all that connects us . . . Sprinkled with historical, cultural and geographical references of the three countries, You Can’t Bury Them All triggers one’s curiosity by offering a myriad of powerful and profound images.” — Kurdistan24.net
“Woodcock takes the reader on a journey of stark, uncomfortable and, at times, incomprehensible truths about conflict and the nature of humanity.” — Atlantic Books Today
“From the first pages of You can’t bury them all, the writing hums with internal music . . . A wry humor chuckles like a thoughtful bassline throughout the book.” — Scene Magazine
Reviews for Farhang Book One
https://www.cbc.ca/books/33-canadian-poetry-collections-to-watch-for-in-fall-2023-1.6936567