Diana Woodcock

Beggar in the Everglades

Praise

“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

“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

“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