"Work" is a poem whose wide-open diction sounds artless yet is anything but. It has tremendous clarity, and works with great sophistication to portray not just a particular past but its resonance. The leap to bereavement that occurs near the end of the poem is completely earned, and all the more moving for its understatement.
-- Fiona Sampson * Ledbury Poetry Competition 2017 *
In this issue of Stand, Anna Woodford's brilliant Poem for the "Archive" considers the relationship between what we write and how it lasts:
Sometimes when I write poetry I wonder
If what I'm doing is really writing
my own name over and over
like a kid with a sparkler
For me, her words offer a neat take on Harold Bloom's famous dictum that "every poem is a misinterpretation of a parent poem".
-- Helen Mort * Stand magazine *
In the witty and self-mocking "Beginners' Meditation", the speaker finds "the Compassion Centre is locked" and yet, by inhabiting that frustration fully, arrives at a moment of unexpected transcendence, glimpsing the coexistence of past and present.
-- Michael Laskey * McLellan Poetry Prize 2014 *
Anna Woodford's meditative new poems are full of an exquisite sense of time and change, reckoning and reconsideration. In deceptively plain language, full of beautifully straightforward music, these poems pare back layers of history to explore family, the flesh and deep feeling with great acuity and wisdom.
-- Jacob Polley * Northern Writers' Awards, New Writing North 2011 *
Of course, there were several films that I had seen before that were a delight to see screening at the festival (a good poetry film keeps on giving after all). I hadn't seen Kate Sweeney and Anna Woodford's Work (although I knew the poem on the page). The weaving of Sweeney's Post-it animation with Woodford's words reminded me how important it is to have a strong poem for a poetry film to be truly effective.
-- Moving Poems Magazine * Steve Ronnie *
