Friends gather to remember a wonderful member of the Bird & Beckett family, whose lively and generous intellect engaged readily and eagerly with the questions of poetry, philosophy & humanism that form the basis of true community.  Maurice Woods was a doctor, a soldier and a poet, serving in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Haiti and other nations in times of crisis, always tasked with helping to ease the pain inflicted on innocent souls when wars and societal ruptures have threatened basic day-to-day life, and with helping to rebuild the physical and social infrastructure that can allow healing to begin.

Maurice was in and out of San Francisco, and Glen Park, from the time we opened the store in 1999 and was fondly regarded and very much appreciated by such Bird & Beckett regulars as Jerry Ferraz, Walker Brents, Alice Rogoff, Linda Hmelo, Jeri Fetzer, Veronica Oliva, Keith Felton and many others — including the late Mary Goode, Blanche Bebb, Steve Choisser, Sterling Bunnell… the list goes on. His long-time friend Kay Lamming kept tabs on Maurice in recent years as he moved around from New Mexico to Colorado to Oregon, always searching for opportunities to do good lab research in medicine and to find poetry communities wherever he landed, and she checked in with us often to give us word of his doings and whereabouts.

Maurice passed back through San Francisco a few times in the past several years and it was always as if he had never left, whether engaging over a poem by Seamus Heaney, sharing insights about world events informed by his history in disaster triage, or reciting bits of his epic poem-in-progress recounting the world he encountered whenever he stepped out his door in the morning, the poem that started with the phrase “Been out all day…”

Read Maurice’s obituary here.