From the Contemporary Poetry Series #2
Seasons is a series of prose poems concerning the seasons, but that’s just a starting point. Keeping her attention at the constant intersection of the self with climate and environment, Adnan writes: “To see is to think.” The result is a kind of inner dialogue between the senses and the mind, one’s skin and the world that blurs their boundaries. As the poet takes us into the nooks, crannies and abysses of her meditations, we encounter surrender and revelation throughout.
Etel Adnan
Praise for Seasons
A series of meditations following the sun, Seasons arrives in mesmerizing waves of observation and reflection. The blue depths of Adnan’s inquiry—into the nature of Being, Time, knowledge itself—crest moment upon moment of quiet revelation, as the passions of history, myth, today, and yesterday rage and subside beneath her watchful eye. “To think is not to contemplate, it’s to witness.” So stanzas wash upon the page’s horizon, ever moving toward the mind’s encounters with the world. Intimate with ephemera, alert to what’s hidden, Seasons seeks the universe within and beyond the spirit’s changeable weather, finding everywhere its center.
— Megan Pruiett
[In Seasons] we quickly realize we are in the presence of a deeply intuitive, almost frenetically responsive mind… We are to enter an exquisitely imagined and private world, where “the oak tree is growing with anxiety,” and “no object can compete with a sound’s intimacy.”
— Mark Grimes, Al Jadid