In her seventh collection, HEARTSCAPES (Shanti Arts Publishing), Lee Woodman constructs a poetic cartography of the heart, charting all of its love and sentiment in a lifetime. Spanning 104 pages, this collection reads like an unsparing narrative of endurance, tracing a life from childhood, divorce, pandemic isolation, and the quiet, stubborn recalibrations of aging.

The collection opens with biological and familial continuity. Here, memory and love are rooted in nature and intergenerational touch points. Yet, even in these early, joyful, affectionate recollections of parents, grandchildren, and childhood reading rituals, a heart’s contradiction and an undercurrent of grief are already present.

Woodman excels at grounding abstract absence in tactile detail: a father’s private vocabulary, imagined postcards sent from the afterlife, and the stark silence left by an elderly neighbor whose husband chooses to stop eating. These early pieces establish a crucial thematic tension: love as both a sanctuary of belonging and an inevitable exercise in witness and loss.

As Woodman moves from early infatuations, evoked through memories of India and school dances into the central narrative of adult partnership, the collection shifts its cadence. The relationship at the heart of HEARTSCAPES—sustained over decades through shared art, travel, and film—is subjected to a forensic gaze.

Woodman charts the slow, bureaucratic erosion of intimacy. In these candid poems, the failure of care, trust, and physical safety makes the survival of the self an urgent imperative. The conflict is emotional and logistical. Disputes over money, legal agreements, mismatched sleep cycles, and everyday habits transform her world into a theatrical staging ground where two people attempt to inhabit the same blueprint while slowly growing alien to one another.

The final movement of HEARTSCAPES deals with the strange, surreal aftermath of separation. Finalized in an eleven-minute Zoom hearing during pandemic isolation, with the ex-husband absent, the divorce leaves a landscape of quiet reality.

Woodman captures the eerie silence of divorce: a wedding ring tucked into an ice cube tray under the bed, legal bills, the shifting dynamics of adult friendships, and the cautious re-entry into public life through masked walks in New York and Washington. Remarkably, the collection refuses to frame later life as a period of passive decline. Woodman insists on the persistence of appetite, candidly depicting online dating and the ongoing presence of erotic desire in old age.

HEARTSCAPES is a formidable, deeply humane collection. Woodman’s formal control, her sharp ear for speech rhythms, subtle sonic refrains, and refusal of sentimental slogans, allows her to map the heart’s complex rollercoaster without losing structural poise. It is a work for any reader seeking a contemporary poetry of lived experience: one that acknowledges that while structures break, the voice recording of the heart remains fiercely intact.