Written over roughly the space of a year The Wood Pigeons began as a 365 word story. The 261 chapters here represent the removal of words at a rate of roughly one per day. Part Droste effect the result is a narrative that is highly recursive yet just as varied too, leading finally and inevitably to nothing.
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Pages: 270
Dimensions: 5 x 8
ISBN: 978-1086559958
Cat No: DW-001-44
Imprint: Dostoyevsky Wannabe Originals
Publishing Model: Classic
James Davies is the author of the novel When Two Are In Love or As I Came To Behind Frank’s Transporter co-written with Philip Terry, the short story Changing Piece and several poetry collections including Plants, A Dog and stack. For a number of years he organised the important event series The Other Room with Tom Jenks and Scott Thurston and continues to run his long-running and influential poetry press if p then q. Between 2017-18 he was Poet in Residence at The University of Surrey.
Is this an obsessive rumination upon a vanished bit of everyday? Do a writer’s revisions push a book to the edge of disappearing? Viewed as a whole its chapters reduce from prolixity to a single word, but from one chapter to the next what gets lost is concealed by narrative’s ability to patch up gaps, plus the typesetter’s arts, at work upon a fiction of C and D, sleep, a glass of wine, a pullover, on repeat. Does a novel decay to develop? Does each micro-adjustment of a novel's code re-figure protagonists, intoxicant on new terms? It spells the “hoo-hooing of the wood pigeons” as well as literature ever could.
- David Berridge
