The Wood Pigeons

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

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.

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.