Surviving the Love Flood

‘I have lived both in hermitages and whorehouses,’ Eddie Woods writes in one of his short stories; ‘I have yet to find one more spiritual than the other.’

In Amsterdam, though, Woods lives near the Amstel. The apartment, which he shares with ex-wife (and still closest friend) Jane Harvey, is authentic Old Amsterdam, too: one floor in a house that was no doubt once the respectable residence of a well-off city official, now converted into a strange collection of small rooms that connect with each other only by virtue of the fact that they are contiguous.

Woods’ tiny bedroom contains only some shelves of books and a narrow mattress on the floor neatly made up with a colourful blanket and a single pillow. It might almost be the room of a bookish monk.

‘The prince sleeps here when he’s in town,’ he says. ‘Then I move to Jane’s bed, and she moves to the couch.’ The prince is Rama Varma, an Indian musician who comes to town every so often. ‘Well, every six months or so.’ He’s also one of the patrons of Woods’ latest book of poems.

The modest little bed is a surprise, considering that as a man and as a poet—is there a difference?—Woods lives his life in the celebration of sex. ‘Only when gripped / by raging carnal fever / lashed by waves / of relentless passion / can I ever hope to capture / glimpses of enlightenment,’ he writes in one of the poems of this recent collection. Maybe the narrow bed is the one place he can keep mostly for himself, the one spot where he can retire from the fray.

The collection, Tsunami of Love: a Poems Cycle, is an attempt to get over a six-year love affair for which he uprooted himself from his base in this city to move to Devonshire, England. ‘I got back and I was in a tunnel,' he says. 'OK, call it a nervous breakdown. I was doing this, I was doing that. I didn’t know the state I was in. And then I realised that there was no way out but to write a poem. And it had to be a good one.’

The eponymous poem of the collection is written in the form of a letter to the woman he left last year, or was asked to leave. It reads, the first time round, like a tidal wave of the emotion most people want to address to a lover they have lost. ‘One tsunami, two tsunamis / three tsunamis, four. / I live on the edge / of total recall,’ he writes. Very personal, very direct, it is nevertheless a tour de force of emotional expression.

And, perhaps surprisingly for a poet who has impeccable road cred as a member of a line of expatriate American writers obsessed by travel and sex, and who has chewed the fat with William Burroughs and cruised for male lovers with Tennessee Williams, it is on the whole quite chaste. Was there some special reason not to employ the pornographic directness he has used to such good effect in stories like ‘A Gift to the Goddess’?

‘I hadn’t thought of that, really,’ says Woods. ‘I have never been known for wearing kid gloves. If you can write erotically without being pornographic, so much the better, no? Porn has its place, is oftentimes essential. There was no place for it, and no reason, in the Tsunami poems.’

That is, as a servitor at the altar of Kali, Woods is a one-man experiment with life; he recognises that the ways of love are strange and unpredictable. (If they weren’t, I can’t help thinking, humans would surely have given it up long ago, and found some more rational way to entertain each other—and for that matter, procreate.)

‘Look,’ he says later in his attic office, which is full of neatly ordered boxes of tapes of conversations and cabinets of filed correspondence and mss, ‘these are her letters.’ He shows me a large box full of letters, many still with their envelopes. ‘When we weren’t together we’d write to each other sometimes five, six times a day.’

But like the song says, it’s all over now. As these poems suggest, Woods has come through. And like the experience of love itself, the simplicity and directness of them is deceptive. Whose tsunami is this, in fact; which way does the tidal wave flow; who gets swept away in the end?

© 2005, 2012 by Richard Jurgens

This review originally appeared in Amsterdam Weekly (No. 41, October 2005)