The Friday Poem on 11th July 2025

Matthew Paul reviews 'Everything is Present' by Anna Woodford (Salt, 2025)

Women as Tables

after ‘This Girl Bends’ by Kerry Stewart (1996)

Not Allen Jones’ spike-heeled mannequin,
down on all fours on a bit of sixties
spread sheepskin, with a table top
bolted to her back and bare breasts
screaming Knave, nibbles, cocktail sausages

but her flat-footed kid sister, scrubbed face
facing upwards. She proffers the board
of her chest and torso. Her arms are fused
to her sides. She looks unstable –
if she is a table at all, she is not
for the faint-stomached. Her housecoat
is the colour of flesh that has been
dredged from a river. Touch me she says
and you’ll be wearing your dinner.

---

‘Women as Tables’ is from Everything is Present by Anna Woodford (Salt, 2025) – big thanks to Salt for letting us reproduce it here.

---

In general, poetry-folk don’t like to talk about money. But at £10.99 for 30 poems (only eight of which edge onto a second page and none beyond that), Everything is Present is indeed a slim volume, even with six blank end-pages of padding. Woodford’s debut, Birdhouse (2010), comprised 62 poems across 68 pages. Do the 30 poems divided into three sections here really justify publication as a collection, or might they have been better presented in pamphlet form?

The answer surely lies in that section division. The three parts are presented in reverse chronology as ‘End’, ‘Middle’ and ‘Beginning’, echoing the title’s preoccupation of the idea that the past and future are alive in the present. Notions of time are, of course, a well-worn literary theme. Martin Amis’s novel Time’s Arrow (1991) used reverse chronology, as did his step-mother Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Long View (1956), but this interesting structural device has been in play at least since Virgil wrote the Aeneid. My first reading of Everything is Present was from front to back, but for the second, I read from back to front. What were the benefits of the reverse chronology, I kept asking myself – other than to subvert the received notion of linear time? But perhaps that was enough.

To start at the ‘End’ then, the reader encounters a poem about Woodford’s Jewish grandfather who escaped from Nazi-occupied Poland and made it to the UK. This is well-worked ground, yet ‘Portrait of My Grandparents as Souvenirs’ is startling in how Woodford pursues the metaphor as a way of writing about displacement, exile and all the complexity thereby entailed:

Granddad is praying though his Torah is
upside down. Granny is playing the fiddle.
Granddad’s insides have been hollowed out
of wood and he has a slot in his back.

Poems about Woodford’s mother’s death during the Covid pandemic follow. The sadly ironic title and last few clauses (“Go Mum! Go for it! Moira, Go!”) of ‘Go, Mum!’ are echoed in the section’s final poem, ‘After You’:

[…] A year after you died,
how I love bumping into you on Gosforth High Street
with your overflowing bags and your sparkly
pom-poms shouting Go Anna! Go Anna! Go!

Notice how the tense changes from past to present in the space of the first two clauses in these lines, in keeping with the book’s overarching theme – or, should I say, one of its themes; the theme of identity seems equally important, of which more later.

The stand-out poem in this opening section is another ironically-titled poem, ‘Bright Side’, which is as fine and moving a poem about loss as Julia Copus’s magisterial ‘The Grievers’. Its syntax tumbles, jumbles and elides in a pell-mell piling-up of images and hackneyed phrases to articulate a sense of the weirdness of grief:

I was not expecting to be grabbed
mid-sentence about how well I was
doing Come Here and taken in
for a hug, for all the naughty
lockdown hugs to feel like safe
sex, for my body to be open
as a fresher’s to any passing stranger’s,
for how everything was suddenly
a sign – the sign in the chemist’s Own
Your Own Skin the subway graffiti
Be Nice Man

Woodford is not a formalist and many of her poems, like this one, are blocks, the success of which is largely dependent on how the line-breaks (and, where appropriate, stanza-breaks) control the pace, disguise surprises and enable double-meanings. Here, the poet successfully exploits these effects and more. There is surrealism and black comedy, for example: “I was not expecting / my father to fall out from my mother’s / sleeve, for him to career on his castors / in the middle of a clapping circle”.

Themes from one poem are often echoed in another, lending the collection a certain coherence

Themes and lines from one poem are often echoed in another, lending the collection a certain coherence. The idea in ‘Bright Side’, for example, of the poet’s body being “open / as a fresher’s to any passing stranger’s” returns in ‘Pyjama Jump’, (a notorious former Sheffield student event) where she experiences “Such a night! Snogging Everyone! Everyone’s / Boyfriend! […] I would embrace / my would-be wantonness – briefly / holding everyone dear and kissing / and kissing and kissing. Regardless.”

‘The Former Life’ brings the identity theme most obviously to the fore: in an “A4 windowless manila” envelope, the poet finds documents relating to her grandfather’s original existence (how much work is that “windowless” doing there?). Among them, she finds his photo:

[…] Here he is, all
eyes, in a displaced person’s camp.

Here is a faded book of Thirteen
Polish Legends. In 1947, he changed
his name to Richard, leaving behind

this old stuff that can never
be sorted out, for others to hang on to,
to hold up to the light.

That clever break on “changed” enables us to sense, both before and after we read the next line, that he changed his personality as well as his name. (In Birdhouse, incidentally, ‘Going Underground’ memorably details how her grandmother chose their name: “Between Buckhurst Hill and Roding Valley, / she found their surname on the London Tube map— / Woodford—because she liked its sound.”)

But Everything is Present also implicitly addresses Woodford’s own various identities and roles – as a grandchild, daughter, girl, woman, partner and mother. The seven poems in ‘Middle’ are necessarily more inward-looking. ‘Derailed’ uses the backdrop of the railway accident of the title to capture how quickly life gathers steam from early adulthood into almost middle age: “Still I am in awe / of how we nearly died twenty years ago and knew / to just hold each other, then the lightness with which / we scrambled up the bank and back into our lives.” Other highlights are ‘LotsofPeopleinaRoom’, a joyous hymn to strangers and neighbours, and ‘2020’, a delightful love poem to her partner:

[…] I think of your spoons
with their dear open faces, your knives
with no sharp edges and, especially, the warm dark
of your bedroom like the insides of an airing cupboard
where a child might giggle during a game of Sardines.

It seems telling that Woodford writes “might” rather than “would” in that last line. Interestingly, the poem follows ‘Women as Tables’, which celebrates the Feminist art of Kerry Stewart and rebuts the sexism of Allen Jones’s 1969 trio of ‘erotic’ sculptures, Hatstand, Table and Chair. A trick was perhaps missed, however, in not sequencing the poems so that it and ‘2020’ faced each other in a two-page spread.

The final section, ‘Beginning’, starts with poems which more overtly address sex, and how young people edge towards it. ‘Room’ is a nicely detailed chronicle of relationships: “We were down a ginnel, playing House / of Pain, Blur and REM, playing the scoring league / (1 for a snog, 2 for a snog and a – etc) thongs / coo-cooing on radiators and no toilet paper.” On a similar theme, the next poem, ‘The Car Crash Of Our Relationship’ ends sardonically on another time-shifting note: “It was another lifetime / before we had to pick up our kids from somewhere.”

Woodford’s readers have to accept, I think, that the accretion of memories and sometimes mundane incidents will often appear to lead not to an epiphany, punchline or end-point, but instead are a means to an end in themselves. That is especially true of those poems depicting her youth and convent school days. ‘Vision’ provides remarkable images – e.g. “Gym ropes fall / like snakes from the sky’s steel bar” – but while the portrait it gives of its subject starts brilliantly, it isn’t as fully rendered in the period of the catching-up years later, onto which the poem all-too-briefly moves. The ten paragraphs / stanzas of the imaginative prose-poem ‘Notes on Kaye’ recall a friend from her teenage years, her admirable individualism enhanced with hints of fantasy and magical realism:

If Kaye was a Lego figure, she would come with a set of OEDs in one hand and a menthol cigarette in the other and a little me, at 17, with an open book.

A funky furniture shop called Kaye’s Place would have a warm brown table in its window, just cleared of the breakfast things.

Of the book’s closing poems, to my mind the boldest and most memorable is ‘A Claim on the Estate of Miss Rene Shill’, an elegy for an inspirational Music teacher: “Magnificent Shill! / her mouth wide open as legs as she held on and on / to her top note.” Good as it is, the collection doesn't have many flourishes to compare with this.
The penultimate piece, ‘Making sandcastles is like making love’ doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its title, the impact of which is diminished by repeating it in the body of the poem.

Everything is Present ends as it began, with family; in this instance the poet's son, in ‘Home/Time’, which opens time-bendingly with discombobulating syntax:

How my son is is is five
minutes and four decades ago
was me. How he is now and ever
shall be on this golden afternoon
gathering conkers from an old tree.
How we stop look listen all the way
home home to Mum. How I carry him.

For the life of me, I can’t parse that opening sentence, but never mind, because I instinctively sense that this is really lovely and loving poetry, simultaneously demonstrating the joy of inter-generational relationships, time playing its tricks, and, above all, the beauty and tenderness of unconditional familial love.

So is this a pamphlet masquerading as a full collection? Its structure in reverse chronological sections adds complexity and interest, as do the thematic connections. Still, I can't help feeling that another handful of poems could have consolidated it into an outstanding book. To me, it's not quite that. But it's well-crafted and memorable, an undoubtedly rich reading experience. Each of the poems has its moments, and some individual pieces are exceptional.

---

Matthew Paul lives in Rotherham and worked as a local government education officer for many years. His first collection, The Evening Entertainment, was published by Eyewear in 2017. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, has just been published by Crooked Spire Press. He is also the author of two haiku collections, The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015), and is co-writer / editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. Matthew Paul’s blog is here.

---

Anna Woodford is the author of five poetry books and pamphlets: Changing Room (Salt, 2018), Birdhouse(Salt, 2010), Party Piece (Smith Doorstop, 2009), Trailer (Five Leaves, 2008) and The Higgins’ Honeymoon(2003). She has won an Authors’ Foundation award, an Eric Gregory award, a PBS recommendation, an Arvon/Jerwood apprenticeship and two Northern Writers’ awards.

---

As well as browsing our Substack, it’s worth visiting The Friday Poem website where you can browse our Archive of more than 700 posts dating back to early 2021.

---

Help support The Friday Poem – buy us a coffee to help us stay awake as we strive to bring poetic excellence to your inbox every Friday. If you can't afford to donate, no worries, we’re going to keep on doing it anyway! Big thanks for everything, you lovely poetry peeps.