A Review of Diana Woodcock's Poetry Collection Holy Sparks
Alexander Levering Kern
Diana Woodcock’s Holy Sparks is an ecopoetic and spiritual tour de force. In this astonishing collection, the poet calls us to renew our covenant with creation (and Creator) as she travels the planet, observing beauty and brokenness with the eyes of a naturalist, the heart of a mystic, and the cry of an ancient prophet. At times elegiac, at times ecstatic, these poems invariably command our attention, inviting us to inhabit our world more deeply, and live in kinship with all creation.
Woodcock’s poems express not simply an affinity for the natural world, but a nondualistic identification – a radical interbeing with other species (birds, camels, elephants)- marked by moments of startling mystical experience and recognition that “all life is one.” She has an extraordinary talent for observing minute manifestations of life (an atom, mollusk, or single grape), then zooming out to traverse the planet from Arabia to Siberia, from the Tongass of Alaska to the Everglades. Hers is powerful poetry of place in a world made of “primordial love.”
If Woodcock’s world is one of companionship with kindred species whom she calls “my mentors,” she converses equally with a wide range of mystics, poets, and prophets. Here we encounter the words of Merton, Eckhart, and Julian of Norwich; Rachel Carson, Gandhi, and Albert Schweitzer; Whitman, Dickinson, and Dostoevsky; Rumi and Rilke, the Bible and Tao Te Ching. With Woodcock and her myriad teachers and saints - and in solidarity with indigenous peoples around the world - we (re)discover our place in the great “liturgy of the cosmos.”
Holy Sparks will engage readers of poetry, travel, and nature writing, and those on the contemplative-activist journey. These poems invite us to a ancient/new way of seeing and being– stillness, attention, being “alive right where we are” – and to an environmental ethic of “ruthless compassion,” resistance to the “global appetite for more,” a steadfast commitment to “hurt not the earth,” and a conviction that “everything/ merits deliverance.” With the poet, we grieve the realities of ecocide, yet still find the courage to “shout and howl/ Hallelujah!'' at the miraculous resurrections that surround us. Never sanguine about the planetary perils we face, Woodcock confronts the darkness - “broods over the void”- and arrives at a hard-won hope rooted in love and creation itself: “Lofty as love, hope looks at absolute/contradiction – life, death –/and pronounces a benediction.”
With Holy Sparks, Diana Woodcock claims a place among the great ecopoets and spiritual writers of our day. A cri de coeur from a hurting planet and a balm for the soul in times of trouble, these poems challenge us, with Julian of Norwich, to “dare still believe [that] all shall be well.”
Alexander Levering Kern is a widely published poet, writer, and editor. A Quaker chaplain and interfaith community organizer, Alex serves as the founding Executive Director of the Center for Spirituality, Dialogue, and Service and founding co-editor/publisher of Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality & the Arts (pensivejournal.com), both based at Northeastern University in Boston. Author of forthcoming collections of poems from Cervena Barva Press and Shanti Arts Publishing, Alex is also editor of the anthology Becoming Fire: Spiritual Writing from Rising Generations. His poems appear in Spiritus, CONSEQUENCE online, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), About Place Journal, Spare Change News, Ibbetson Street, Soul-Lit, and elsewhere. His interfaith peace and social justice work been covered by the Washington Post, Boston Globe, Harvard Gazette, and other media, and has taken him to post-earthquake Haiti, rural Honduras, post-apartheid Southern Africa, peacemaking communities in northern Nigeria, and on interfaith pilgrimages with students to the Arizona-Mexico borderlands and from Selma, Alabama to St. Louis/Ferguson, Missouri in 2015.