Farhang (Book Two)

Every poem in this volume was conceived and written over two years in Iqaluit, Nunavut, along the Apex Trail, among the rocks and rivers of Sylvia Grinnell Park. Steeped more deeply in symbolism and surrealism, Farhang: Book Two binds the natural world through which Woodcock walked to his need to artistically archive a life before memory distorts it — before truth turns to fable, and fable to forgetting.

In Farhang: Book Two, Patrick Woodcock continues to celebrate, honor, and mourn the world he’s witnessed during three decades as a migrant writer. After expanding upon the Farhang character in the book’s opening section, he then turns inward — abandoning the lyric “I” for an intimate, universal “you.” In this voice, “you” may become a boat, a raven, a wooden cross fashioned from a transport skid — or even a beloved Rubens painting drifting across Frobisher Bay.

Structurally, this collection departs from the geography of its predecessor, no longer dividing its poems by country. Instead, it threads together fragments from more than 40 nations, interwoven within each poem to evoke the shared pulse of humanity — the universality of joy and mourning, of celebration and loss — revealed in the ways we honor our dead and the instruments we raise to praise the living.