between the apple and the bite
The poems in ‘predicaments’ explore women’s responses to the constraints and consequences of choices they have made. Their responses are not much changed through the millennia of myth, history and into contemporary times. The poet reflects on significant moments in the lives of women such as Helen of Troy, Delilah and Joan of Arc, and the predicaments they are faced with in a man’s world.
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between the apple and the bite
‘. . . . . . . . . . . . handicapped
by the ancient rule of the father
tangled in a confusion of lessons
passed from mother to daughter:
the desire to be desired
never to give offence
the divine right of kings’
The poems in ‘predicaments’ explore women’s responses to the constraints and consequences of choices they have made. Their responses are not much changed through the millennia of myth, history and into contemporary times. The poet reflects on significant moments in the lives of women such as Helen of Troy, Delilah and Joan of Arc, and the predicaments they are faced with in a man’s world.
Sue Woodward has spent most of her life in Cape Town although she was born and educated in Johannesburg. She studied English and Psychology at the University of the Witwatersrand, became a teacher and then a writer and editor of educational materials and children’s stories.
She has been published in many journals and anthologies and in 2019 won the McGregor Poetry Festival competition. between the apple and the bite is her debut collection of poetry. She lives in Muizenberg close to the sea, the mountains and the vlei.
“In these poems Sue Woodward works in a mode of some of the most powerful contemporary poems in English: Deryn Rees-Jones, Fiona Benson and Alice Oswald have recent collections in which Homeric figures are foregrounded. The poems in Woodward’s collection also have Biblical bases; in a re-imagining and re-contextualisation of old “western” myths we are given new insights into how the old tropes are present in our own psyches.” – Joan Metelerkamp
“These poems are an imaginative voicing of Greek goddesses, biblical and contemporary heroines examining age-old gender issues. Beautifully written the poet looks to the past for explanations and also feels for her own voice and way through the personal poems.” – Christine Coates
