"From a cubicle without a roof
smokers' miasma permeates the airport
We are, all of us, out of time"
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.
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 also published three volumes of poetry:
- Séance for the Body
- Love, Hades and Other Animals
- A Saving Bannister