Premonition
Premonition
Etel Adnan (1925-2021) enjoyed a distinguished career as a poet, playwright, and visual artist. Her rich body of work documents an unblinking witness to beauty in nature, human beings, and art; to cruelty, especially as enacted in the mindless violence of war; and to the power of love and human perseverance. Her work, as a whole, is a faithful record of the times and places she lived in Beirut, Lebanon; in Paris, France; and in the San Francisco Bay Area. In Premonition the voice is wise and paradoxical, opening with the observation, “There’s always a conductive thread through space for untenable positions.” Sentences are set apart in aphoristic cuts never wholly separate from this “conductive thread,” and always shaped by the gem-like compressions of poetry. Premonition is a short book that refuses finality in a world of contingencies and human unpredictability. The only sure place to stand, in this late work of Adnan’s, must be created from day to day in life and art (Kelsey Street Press).