Synopsis
Trailer is to be the spring Poetry Book Society pamphlet choice for 2008 "Dad has always driven slowly as though he has always been dragging this trailer full of loose ends from his childhood that he can't let go" Trailer is a series of meditative poems about the poet's family history and the way the past travels with us. The poems - like paintings by Chagall - stir up time and place to dissolving point, honouring the material world but not taking it for what it is. Or isn't. Trailer is a memorial to the poet's grandparents and great grandparents. "'...how much dark one candle/can leave' writes Anna Woodford at the passing of her grandmother. It's a dark that will accompany, will see her through. There's a level-headed love here that, like life itself, is strong enough to carry the equipages of wit and brilliance in her poetry." - Gillian Allnutt "I never thought I would use the word 'cool' as a compliment to characterise a young poet's work, least of all when it deals with family material of such deep personal resonance. And yet that is my reaction to Anna Woodford's workings in what has lately become a popular literary territory involving grandparents and immigration. The emotions are strong, and for this very reason, in relation to her material, she stands, whether consciously or intuitively, 'at a slight angle to the universe', as Forster famously wrote of Cavafy. She is tough-minded and tender-hearted." - Anthony Rudolf
I’ve heard Anna Woodford’s name mentioned here and there over the last while so I opened her chapbook with interest, read one poem, and was gripped. Trailer is about different generations of the poet’s family—photographs of one set of great-grandparents are included—with a particular focus on her grandfather, Ludwick Magenheim, who left behind the concentration camps and even his own name when he married her grandmother. And if this all sounds like previously explored territory for poetry, think again. Anna Woodford makes it lively and new, and in the way of the best of poems, she starts with the specific and takes off...
Eleanor Livingstone
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