By Diana Woodcock. Codhill Press, 2023.
The speaker of the poems in Heaven Underfoot –by immersing herself in the more than human world of several diverse biomes, from the Arabian Desert to the Everglades, Southern Africa, the Arctic Circle, Great Smoky Mountains, and the Tongass National Forest– has endeavored to make the non-human environment central rather than marginal as she explores and celebrates the sacred within and on this earth.
The poems in Heaven Underfoot qualify as ecopoetry as they exemplify the four features of environmentally conscious texts, which set them apart from nature writing (as outlined by American scholar Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination): they make the non-human environment central rather than marginal; they feature human interest as only one valid focus; they hold humans accountable to the environment; and they portray nature as a process rather than a fixed framework.
Diana Woodcock is the author of seven chapbooks and five poetry collections, most recently Holy Sparks (finalist for the 2020 Paraclete Press Poetry Award) and Facing Aridity (finalist for the 2020 Prism Prize for Climate Literature). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a Best of the Net nominee, she received the 2022 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award (for her sixth full-length collection, Heaven Underfoot) and the 2011 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize for Women (for her debut collection, Swaying on the Elephant’s Shoulders). Her grand prize-winning poem, “Music as Scripture,” was performed live onstage in Lincoln Park, San Francisco at Artists Embassy International’s 21st Dancing Poetry Festival. Prior to teaching at VCUarts Qatar (since 2004), she worked for nearly eight years in Tibet, Macau and on the Thai/Cambodian border. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from Lancaster University, where she researched poetry’s role in the search for an environmental ethic.
Praise for Heaven Underfoot
Diana Woodcock’s sixth book of poems, Heaven Underfoot, celebrates the immeasurable abundance, beauty, and strangeness of earth’s creatures in various parts of the world where she lives or has traveled: the Arabian Desert, southern Africa, the Svalbard Peninsula, Florida’s River of Grass, the Great Smoky Mountains, the Tongass. Her immersion in and intimate knowledge of the other-than-human world make the book a rich pleasure. There’s “so much we can’t know,” she writes; yet, “becoming overwhelmed by a sense of your own insignificance, you find it liberating, intoxicating; you feel, for the first time in the longest time, utterly at peace here in the midst of wild things.” And in the poem “Put All America Behind You,” she sounds an urgent note about the environmental peril of our times: “Wander and wonder / on [earth’s] rich mosaic—let her fill in / the gap and bring you back / from the dark brink.”
— Ann Fisher-Wirth, author of Paradise Is Jagged and The Bones of Winter Birds. Coeditor of The Ecopoetry Anthology.
