. . . Patrick Woodcock has sent back a document from his time in Kurdish Iraq. His adventurous Echo Gods and Silent Mountains is a noisy, conflicted affair, unwilling to sacrifice complexity for theme. Woodcock flirts with various traditions, including folk song, prophecy and debate, while his formal preferences involve spacey caesuras, refrains and the kind of self-aware rhyme you see coming from the line’s first syllable . . .  [Echo Gods and Silent Mountains] becomes a wild, insidious journal, reminiscent of Dionne Brand’s Griffin-winning Ossuaries, with its wounded morality and its chugging, unstoppable, rhythms.