Beggar in the Everglades by Diana Woodcock
$14.49
Spinoza said that God was Nature itself. Diana Woodcock’s poems written at close range in The Everglades remind us how beautiful and fragile this globe is. Here is an energetic listening to the earth, a kind badly needed now.
–Roger S. Mitchell, Delicate Bait and Lemon Peeled the Moment Before: New and Selected Poems
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Diana Woodcock writes of the Everglades, its alligators and anhingas, sawgrass and mangroves, insects and frogs as only one initiated can. These poems testify to immersion and affection. They call plants and creatures and places by name, speak to them and of them intimately. Biological divisions—plant, animal, human—blur and dissolve as the poet knows herself “kin to all of nature.” These are praise poems, ecstatic responses to the spiritual dimensions of landscape and wildness, and from the wilderness they bring us a critical message: “…hope’s voice rings louder here / than that of despair.” These lush poems call us to attention and invite us to joy.
–Anne McCrary Sullivan, Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Take a walk on the wild side with Diana Woodcock’s Everglades-inspired poetry, Beggar in the Everglades. Stand on the edge of a sawgrass prairie, wade through a wetland marsh, become a sunning alligator, a green heron, a mosquito, or even a sawgrass sea. “Become,” as Woodcock directs, “water defying human borders.” In her poem Returning, Woodcock writes that she came to the Everglades never to be quite the same. Readers will never be quite the same after journeying with her through the lush poetry landscape of these Everglades-inspired poems.
–Alicia K. Clavell, Publisher & Editor, Southern Women’s Review
Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]
Description
Beggar in the Everglades
by Diana Woodcock
$14.49, paper
Diana Woodcock has two books forthcoming in 2021: Facing Aridity (a finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature); and Holy Sparks (a finalist of the Paraclete Press Poetry Award). Her first full-length poetry collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, won the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Women’s Poetry Prize. Her second, Under the Spell of a Persian Nightingale, was published in 2015. Her third, Tread Softly, was released in 2018. Chapbooks include Near the Arctic Circle, Beggar in the Everglades, Desert Ecology: Lessons and Visions, Tamed by the Desert, In the Shade of the Sidra Tree, Mandala, and Travels of a Gwai Lo. Widely published in literary journals and anthologies (including Best New Poets 2008), her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award, as well as performed live onstage in Lincoln Park, San Francisco at Artists Embassy International’s 21st Dancing Poetry Festival. Prior to teaching in Qatar at VCUarts Qatar (since 2004), she worked for nearly eight years in Tibet, Macau and on the Thai/Cambodian border.
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