 
Woman Walking
Woman Walking covers over 35 years of Elizabeth Rhett Woods' published poems, from the first slim chapbook, Gone, published by Ladysmith Press in 1972, to 1970: A Novel Poem, published by Ekstasis Editions in 2007. Recurrent themes are freedom, distance, appetite and hunger, waywardness, wanderlust, and the desire for, and fear of, the lover, the mate: commitment, confinement, responsibility. These are the poems of a woman who has come to terms with her life. If she were to write an autobiography, the title would be All Right So Far. Now, what matters most is to enjoy as much as possible of each of the next unknown, but shrinking number of days ahead of her. Woman walking
through the city's secret
of the streets is pacing with the flow of the crowd you are its loosest part stepping out-to pass this couple dawdling by windows slowing down-to let these school girls scamper for a streetcar side-stepping-this fat man arguing with his son into the clear alert and balanced as an Arab mare, beautiful and admired one moment, invisible and forgotten, one moment later. But now you look ahead and there is a cluster of young men on the corner, the scouts of their eyes' artillery already measuring you, threatening to confine you to the level of their reckoning
They must be faced
one by one seen and known to be seen -meet each one's eyes and he is alone- and looks away-and they are reduced to single adversaries, singularly vanquished, while you are walking through a silence of ultra-violet understanding steady as a metronome waking down the miles on the trail of time you are striding through the city  |
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