A poetic journal looks at life in a war-torn country

After two years spent in the Kurdish North of Iraq, Patrick Woodcock has returned with his eighth collection of poetry, Echo Gods and Silent Mountains.

Resisting both summary gestures and grief tourism, these poems form a sustained poetic journal of both Woodcock’s own experiences and those of the Iraqis who befriended him, as it paints a picture of the birth of a new Kurdish state. With poems that are at once deadly serious and poignantly humorous, Echo Gods and Silent Mountains is the work of a poet who cannot live or create without uprooting himself to our world’s most misunderstood and misrepresented regions.