Threshold
Description
Threshold focuses on putative moments of change?when the world shifts even minutely, when perceptions may be transformed, when the mundane becomes uncanny. The poems tell stories, hint at the ineffable.
The dedication to "teachers who step over thresholds with grace and courage" gestures not just to the human, but to the agency of the literary, the visual, experiences of humour or loss, connections with more than human kin, being embodied on this earth.
REVIEWS:
1. "These are poems of kindness and wit and grief, and a fine exploration of what it is that makes for freedom. In what is for me her strongest work so far, Wendy Woodward's skillful words speak of life: a life in which animal beings are our kin, and this human body-heart-mind is awake and tender." ? Em Prof. Julia Martin, University of the Western Cape, English Department
2. "Woodward's collection offers transitions across moments in nature, peopled by beginnings that flutter away from endings. This is magnificent poetry. A celebration of boundary as the beginning of presencing in a most personal, fluid and tangible way: thresholds simultaneously separating and uniting words that allow us to truly see the everyday." ? Vernon RL Head, award-winning novelist & poet
3. "Through landscapes geographic, literary and of the soul, Wendy Woodward's poems present life unflinchingly. Yet a defining commitment to beauty and hope coaxes us into new ways of inhabiting our flawed world. Readers will be intrigued, enlightened, and enchanted." - Beverly Rycroft, poet & novelist
More details
Person
Wendy Woodward is Professor Emerita in the English Department at the University of the Western Cape, where her research and publications focused on Postcolonialism and Human-Animal Studies.
She published The Animal Gaze: Animal Subjectivities in Southern African Narratives (2008) as well as numerous articles locally and internationally. She co-edited Indigenous Creatures, Native Knowledges, Animals and the Arts: Animal Studies in Modern Worlds. Palgrave Macmillan (2017). Recently her series of poems constituted a chapter in a celebratory volume for a high Tibetan Buddhist lama, Gyaltsab Rinpoche (Gyaltsab Book Trust, 2024; Wisdom, 2025). Her poetry has appeared in anthologies and journals in South Africa, North America and Australia.
She has published four volumes of poetry:
- Séance for the Body (Snailpress, 1994)
- Love, Hades and Other Animals (Protea, 2008)
- A Saving Bannister (Modjadji, 2015)
- Threshold (Quilled Ink Press, 2026)
