". . . the eagles flew and flew until they met here
at the centerpoint of land and sea: Delphi. . . . those eagles are always there;
and moreover it seems they always were." -from a 1985 guidebook on Greece

Cover Photo by Brad Iverson Read a review! About Anne Harding Woodworth

THE STORYTELLER TELLS HIMSELF Some say my name comes from the word Ethiop. Yes, I know they say many things about me. I say I'm as Greek as the olives I eat as Greek as the horta greens I pick on the Hill of the Nymphs across from the Acropolis. Unlike the wolf, I do not eat meat. Unlike the lion, I do not keep a lioness. My hair brownish-black and long blends into my graying beard as if a ring of twisted drapery-fringe surrounds and partially shields my face, which some say is ugly. I say it has, well, pleasant mystery about it necessary in my line of work. A small spot darker than my skin clings to my dimming right eye where a dog bit me, or so they say. I was born in Thrace with two cloth pouches hanging from my neck. The red one in back held all my bad traits. I couldn't see it though I always doubted it was very full. The blue one in front was bulging with everyone else's flaws, which I thought were as clear as the night sky over Mt. Pendeli. Some say I'm a slave belonging to the house of Iadmon. I say I walk freely in my world. Like all trapped creatures I revise the truth to survive the road I'm on. My roads are dust. My limp begets quick coin, procures tasty items at a discount salacious ones, too. Once I was behind a red-lipped woman in the agora, whose thick wood soles cut the words "follow me" in the dust. Given to morals, I'll say only this: the follower shall be first. I am on my way to Delphi, source of life and my own feet draw in dust the direction in which I travel.                                ~From “Aesop’s Eagles” © 2001 Anne Harding Woodworth, all rights reserved.  Contact publisher for re-print possibility

COMING SOON FROM NORTHWOOD PRESS:
THE MUSHROOM PAPERS BY ANNE HARDING WOODWORTH

Praise for Aesop's Eagles and Poems from the Road
and Anne Harding Woodworth's Poetry

“What is there about safely putting our poems between two covers and letting them go out into the world?  Bringing to completion the work we’ve been doing? . . . And [this] book is just the right size for poetry. . . .I love the Aesop poems.  That rich context provides drama and landscape.  They are beautifully done.”

Myra Sklarew, poet (Lithuania, New and Selected Poems) and Professor, American University

“There is such a skilled narrative flow, but also a vivid sensual sense of place . . . I got a whole life – and lives of creatures to contend with . . . In the second part, the love poems or lost love poems [like the] fables [are] deceptively simple but profound.  There is so much surprise here of language and insight – in ‘The Walk’ for instance, the levels–all of a sudden–go POW.  ‘Having to breathe / in a way that others don’t’ begins to mean all differentness, whether of pain that sets us apart or our human-ness, which sets us apart from life-enhancing creatures.”

Suzanne E. Berger (Horizontal Woman: The Story of a Body in Exile)

“I enjoyed A’s E.  My favorite is ‘Declension’ – love the wordplay & humor in the midst of serious.  There are lots of wonderful things in this Aesop of [Woodworth’s] – very rich in imagining.”

Ellen Doré Watson, poet (Ladder Music and We Live in Bodies) and Director of Smith College Poetry Center.

“In Aesop’s Eagles, Aesop is nominally the star, though we learn most about the mysterious, shape-shifting freed-slave from a dog that bit him when he was a baby: ‘not a pretty baby / draped in layers of muslin / with an old man face.’  The dog bites the baby and, stunned, reports, 

The baby doesn’t cry.
Instead, he puts his tiny hand
under my chin.  I have no
control over what happens next.
I am licking the wound. 

“ I love this tiny moment – somehow I imagine that this is where Aesop confers speech to the animal; biting him, the dog gets caught in his spell and is transformed into a poet, a storyteller himself.  This is the generosity of Anne’s poetry – everyone and everything is given voice, and the poet (whose imagination in fact fires an entire universe) appears to just step aside and let it happen.”

Libbie Rifkin, author of Career Moves: Olson, Creeley, Zukofsky, Berrigan, and the American Avant-Garde and Poetry Coordinator, Folger Shakespeare Library