Often now when I read the new poems I think of the frustrated conductor I once heard saying to his choir, "I said stronger not louder." This chapbook would make him happy. The refinement of these poems is never a lessening. The seriousness is never labored. It's precise rather than careful. Acute and moving at the same time. The love and compassion is blended with a smart spirit. The tenderness is an adult passion. Jack Gilbert

Anne Love Woodhull's poems in This is What We Have voice what is difficult with an eye for the luminous, with compassion, and with a hard-won knowledge. These poems remind us of ourselves and of the teeming, sensuous world we inhabit. They lend us courage for our labyrinthine journey. Margaret Lloyd

Newly Bare
November Tree

One part of me is quiet, or still,
or nearly dead, so that sometimes
making love becomes an echo
down a long corridor
that has never heard
a voice. It always
makes me cry. He knows hands.
He uses them like mouths.
Bodies afterwards,
lying so simply in a bed,
the garden outside
lying under leaves.There is no slack
in a newly bare November tree. This
is the threshold to winter, having
to find life so far inside,
and finding it.

24 pages/$6
ISBN 1-882983-56-4