A new poem collection by VCU-Q professor

By Anand HollaIn the southern portion of the US state of Florida, the Everglades are a natural region of tropical wetlands, comprising the southern half of a large watershed. Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar (VCU-Q) Professor Diana Woodcock’s new chapbook of poems is an ode to its beauty.The Finishing Line Press has announced the publication of Woodcock’s Beggar in the Everglades, in which she writes of the Everglades, its alligators, anhingas, sawgrass, mangroves, insects and frogs, with a profound sense of knowledge and expertise of the place.“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,” notes Anne McCrary Sullivan in Ecology II: Throat Song from the Everglades.Diana Woodcock’s first full-length collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders, won the 2010 Vernice Quebodeaux International Poetry Prize. Chapbooks include Desert Ecology: Lessons and Visions, Tamed by the Desert, In the Shade of the Sidra Tree, Mandala, and Travels of a Gwai Lo.Her second full-length collection, Under the Spell of a Persian Nightingale, is forthcoming from WordTech Communications. Widely published in literary journals (including Best New Poets 2008), her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net Award. Prior to teaching in Qatar – which she began in 2004 – she worked for nearly eight years in Tibet, Macau and on the Thai/Cambodian border.In Delicate Bait and Lemon Peeled the Moment Before: New and Selected Poems, Roger S Mitchell, observes, “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.”The Everglades is a two million acre wetland ecosystem that reaches from central Florida, near Orlando, all the way south to Florida Bay.