The Eyes Have It, Poetry by Anne Harding Woodworth

In Anne Harding Woodworth‘s The Eyes Have It, all eyes are on the things of the world, viewed, embraced, celebrated with an aye.

Poems by Anne Harding Woodworth

“These are poems to wander slowly among, richly literate and quirkily human poems that invite you to contemplate sight and seeing in new and illuminating ways. Here, the poet unravels visions within visions, chronicles tricks played by vision, the ways things seen can be cloaked, misidentified, or experienced as synesthesia. She conjures up what can no longer be seen: the clothes of slaves, the Jews of Krakow, a body from a chalk outline. In ‘Lift,’ the speaker asks, ‘How do you explain to a blind man / the eye of a hurricane?’ as she examines the absence of vision, the ways we experience the world in darkness, in blindness, when the power goes out, as well as what fills that absence. In ‘One-Eyed Carp at the Deli,’ the narrator says, ‘If my eyes were where my ears are, / hurt would be invisible for me, too. / Pain lies in front, dead on.’”—Katherine E. Young, author of Day of the Border Guards, Poet Laureate, Arlington, VA

“Harding Woodworth is a superbly visual poet. No less sharp of ear than of eye. Hers is a penetrating free-verse gaze—not without a dash of rhyme now and again—onto the kaleidoscope chips of the ‘real world’s’ surface reality, in all the colors and shapes of its many varied configurations. Indeed, we sense her inner eye is probing imagistic surfaces in an effort to reach and embrace an even more ‘real’ real world within that invites us to join our own gaze to hers.”—Norman R. Shapiro, Distinguished Professor of Literary Translation and Poet-in-Residence, Wesleyan University

“How rare to find a thematically integrated collection that does not proceed by lockstep! In spare, graceful mostly-free-verse poems whose complexity derives from depth and range rather than from obscurity of expression, Harding Woodworth explores all kinds of seeing, making new metaphors to find and name the commonality among apparently disparate things. You’ll meet many ‘eyes’ here: eyes of hurricanes, electric eyes, human eyes, evil eyes, eye disorders like Nystagmus. Erotic seeing. Inward seeing embodied as the poet’s reflection glimpsed in a wet sidewalk.”—Rebecca Foust, Marin County Poet Laureate and author of Paradise Drive.

“Anne Harding Woodworth has an eternal impulse to explore what she notices, to peer beneath and into it, to extrapolate from it. This book, full of her characteristic wordplay, irony, surprises and wisdom, is a purely delightful read of which I could have taken much more.”—Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely, author of Letter from Italy, 1944.

ISBN: 978-1625492661, 104 pages

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Also by Anne Harding Woodworth:

Spare Parts: A Novella in Verse

The Artemis Sonnets, Etc.

Trouble

The Spare Parts Saga