Everything is Present by Anna Woodford
Poems within Everything is Present have won the Ledbury Prize, the Wigtown Prize and been featured in the Forward anthology of Poems of the year. The book is a topsy-turvy mid-life coming of age tale. Divided into three sections End/Middle/Beginning and starting at the end. The first section contains award-winning elegies for a mother who died on a locked-down ward during the pandemic and a grandfather who escaped from Nazi-occupied Lwów (then in Poland, now the Ukraine). There is also a poem describing a Jerry Lee Lewis- loving father’s visit to A&E. The second section Middle negotiates the shifting ground of middle age exploring women’s bodies, work, therapy and the consolations of love and spirituality in poems featuring amusement arcades, train derailments and Allen Jones’ controversial women as furniture sculptures. Beginning revisits youthful sex, running away from home and Happy Shopper before embracing middle aged sex and then returning in a (never) ending to the mother.
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