With drawings by Etel Adnan
“The Spring Flowers Own” and “The Manifestations of the Voyage” continue and complete the Cycle of the Linden Tree, which started with two poems previously published in The Indian Never Had a Horse & Other Poems: “One Linden Tree, Then Another Linden Tree,” and “An Alley of Linden Trees, and Lightning.”
Etel Adnan
Praise for The Spring Flowers Own & The Manifestations of the Voyage
Etel Adnan’s poetry is never static: like her paintings and novels, it moves luminous through real life and through dreams. The Spring Flowers Own is precise and passionate, part of a body of work that shows us in detail how, in the poet’s words, “Things shine and hang on.” And then, with Adnan’s unmistakeable and powerful voice, how “Light starts all over again.”
— Sara Miles
Harrowed by desire’s ancient curse, in solo crushed-heart universe, always in every brutish intimacy of public event—harrowed by love’s death’s imperishable lie, by love’s unfailing resurrection—harrowed by subtlest helplessness, grossest anger—Etel Adnan’s work possesses maturity one had thought extinct. I don’t know why so very few Americans write poetry for grown-ups, but Adnan sure does and it’s good.
— Duncan McNaughton
Just where is that voice coming from?… The determining sensibility combines the vistas of an insistently decentered consciousness, defining the poetic self through a contemplation of mortality.
— Michael Beard, World Literature Today
