Six, Poems by Eve Wood
In Eve Wood's powerful second collection, Six, the number six is an evocative emblem not of fear, but of the secret search for strength in the face of daunting oppression. Wood's powerful narratives of the lives of queen--spoken in their haunting but undaunted voices--are a chorus singing within, and against, the darker sides of human history.
"This book of historical persona poems, spoken by the six wives of Henry VIII, could only have been written by a poet of prodigious imaginative powers, skill, and an enormous curiosity. That poet is Eve Wood and Six is a wonderful book."--Thomas Lux
"Eve Wood's latest collection, Six, is inventive, lucid, and chilling. This book is written as lyric autobiography, imaging the interior and exterior lives of Henry VIII's wives as well as their variant deaths. While each woman is distinctly portraited, Ms. Wood's use of returning and startling imagery pulls us into the haunting and heartless atmosphere into which each was thrown by marriage. Henry himself, nearly absent from these pages, remains a suitably ghostlike figure throughout. Equally remarkable are the poet's divinings into these women's relationships with God and nature. These poems are intelligent, craftwise, and deeply felt, each in its own right, and even more so collectively."--Kate Knapp-Johnson
"Eve Wood's haunted and haunting ventriloquisms of sixteenth-century women remind me of John Berryman's hallucinatory Mistress Bradstreet. Like Berryman, Wood shows us what might be made of history if poets had their way."--Michael Collier
Eve Wood's work has appeared in many journals including The Best American Poetry1997, The New Republic, Poetry, The Denver Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her first book, Love's Funeral, was published by Cherry Grove Collections in 2003. Also a visual artist, she is currently represented by Western Project in Culver City, CA. She has published art criticism in Artnet.com, Tema Celeste, ArtUS and Artext.
ISBN 1932339728, 84 pages, $17.00