Merely Players
“All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players,” spoken by Jaques in As You Like It.
Merely Players is poetry about performance of all kinds: stage, film, TV and any other kind of screen. Even the playing field, specifically soccer.
Anne Harding Woodworth’s ninth book, Merely Players, was published in March 2025. You can get it in the usual places where you buy books.
Harding Woodworth and her husband live in Washington DC, when they are not at their cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina. You can find Anne on FaceBook (Anne Harding Woodworth), on X (@aesopseagles), and instagram (annehardingwoodworthpoet).
What these poets say about Merely Players:
From Nancy Fitz-Hugh Meneely—”[Anne} sees and conveys in artful lines (deploying occasional dialogues and interrupted soliloquies to great effect) the truths and secrets that lie behind the scrims of daily life . . .”
From Michael Durack—”[Anne’s} antenna is alert to the most arcane of subjects, but her forensic eye is matched by a warm heart. The world’s a stage maybe, but the men and women of this collection are not merely players; they are much more fascinating than that.”
From Matt Donovan—”Whereas Jaques’ myopic vision of life is rigidly prescribed, the ever-changing, on-the-move poems in Woodworth’s latest collection—which include collage, soliloquy, scripts, and persona poems—are jam-packed with interrogations of the self, the female body, and the shimmering incandescence of our artmaking in its myriad forms.”
Books and Chapbooks
by Anne Harding Woodworth
For more information on Anne’s books, go to the "Books" page.
Merely Players (Turning Point, 2025)
Gender: Two Novellas in Verse (Atmosphere Press, October 2022)
Trouble (Turning Point, 2020)
The Eyes Have It (Turning Point, 2018)
Unattached Male (Poetry Salzburg, 2014)
Artemis Sonnets, Etc. (Turning Point, 2011)
Spare Parts (Turning Point, 2008)
The Mushroom Papers (Northwoods Press, 2002)
Guide to Greece and Back (Lycabettus Press, 1978)
Chapbooks:
The Spare Parts Saga (Turning Point, 2024)
The Last Gun (Cervena Barva Press, 2016)
Herding (Cervena Barva Press, 2014)
Up From the Root Cellar (Cervena Barva Press, 2006)
Aesops Eagles (Northwoods Press, 2001)
Trouble
Cover by Harvey Mudd
Harding Woodworth’s seventh book of poetry, Trouble, appeared in the fall of 2020 (Turning Point Books). In January of 2022, Trouble received the 2022 William Meredith Award for Poetry.
"Wit, humor, irony, formal invention; all flourish in these richly evocative poems, ranging from infancy through senescence.” Werner Gundersheimer
"In the opening poem of Trouble, as the 80-year-old speaker named Hannah meditates on death and various ways of committing suicide, she says, ‘Euphemisms are the result of embarrassment.’ Anne Harding Woodworth’s poems never blush and turn away.” Katie Manning
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The Artemis Sonnets, Etc.
Photo Credit: Hal Looney
Cover photo by Hal Looney
"Here the ground is dappled and rich with mystery and meaning, intelligence and implication. At her best, alongside her keen ear and obvious talent, Harding Woodworth knows well how to make a poem sing and continue singing though the multiple levels of whatever refrain she traverses."
René Ashley
"Woven into this stunning book of poems is the quiet telling of a modern marriage which splits in tow while its teller, who is American becomes firmly wedded forever to its locale, which is Greece." Rod Jellema
The Eyes Have It
Cover photo by Gayle Krughoff
"These are poems to wander slowly among, richly literate and quirkily human poems that invite you to contemplate sight and seeing in new and illuminating ways."
Katherine E. Young
"Harding Woodworth is a superbly visual poet. No less sharp of ear than of eye. Hers is a penetrating free-verse gaze—not without a dash of rhyme now and again—onto the kaleidoscope chips of the 'real world’s' surface reality . . ."
Norman R. Shapiro
“How rare to find a thematically integrated collection that does not proceed by lockstep! In spare, graceful mostly-free-verse poems whose complexity derives from depth and range rather than from obscurity of expression, Harding Woodworth explores all kinds of seeing.” Rebecca Foust
“Anne Harding Woodworth has an eternal impulse to explore what she notices, to peer beneath and into it, to extrapolate from it." Nancy Meneely