Mindscapes

In a comment written for MINDSCAPES, Maryland Poet Laureate and legendary-poetry-talk-show host, Grace Cavalieri“announces a bright new literary light among us.” One recalls the famous letter of Emerson to Walt Whitman who writes, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start…. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying and encouraging.” In Josephine Jacobsen’s poem “Gentle Reader,'' she describes the experience of reading a poet, ''dangerous and steep,'' late at night: “O God, it peels me, juices me like a press; ….. saying like Molly, yes, yes, yes O yes. 

It may be gilding the lily, but Lee Woodman’s poems do indeed seem at once accessible and profound and one can only wonder about the “foreground” Emerson speculates on. She seems to have arrived, full-grown like Athena from the brain of Zeus, though I’m not sure what she would make of the metaphor. This is one beautiful woman whose poems capture what it means to be female with extraordinary insight whether it be the simple grief of a mother bird who has lost a chick, to the Jungian archetype of a woman coming from the sea (“Blue Torso Lady.) In her poem, “My dinner with Athena,” the goddess instructs her to “do magnificent deeds.” At times the poems are nothing less.