A desert liturgy in verse

Holy Sparks, Diana Woodcock’s most recent collection, is a devotional cycle of poems written from within a Muslim-­majority country that speaks across faiths to what is perennial: awe, grief, kinship, surrender. Her spiritual-environmental activism is concerned with “instigating hope / by writing the existent— / my final act of resistance.” This is poetry as moral witness, quietly revolutionary in its affirmation of existence and the fragile dignity of all beings.

Woodcock, a longtime resident of Qatar and professor at VCUarts, writes as one who pays close attention to her adopted landscape. The desert here is not merely a setting but a field of mystical revelation. The title poem begins with an epigraph from Thomas Merton—“There are holy sparks in all created beings”—and then proceeds to embody that vision, observing two palm doves “debating the possibility of mating” on her balcony while a cat watches from the other side of the glass. “I witness / holy sparks on both sides,” she writes, and so frames her poetic act as one of reverent beholding.

This is a book attentive to subtle thresholds: between human and nonhuman, devotion and doubt, life and the slow undoing of ecosystems. Again and again, Woodcock reminds us that our fates are bound to what we overlook or forget to bless. In “The Ecopoet’s Prayer,” she pleads: