Nina Burokas Reviews "SEASON UNLEASHED" by ANNA ODESSA LINZER
SEASON UNLEASHED
by ANNA ODESSA LINZER
reviewed by Nina Burokas
Slipping into a side path, off the dirt road, my feet touch the soft / cushion of deep moss, my heart touches silence and beauty, / a world that has been there—and not there—all these months.
—Anna Odessa Linzer, “Off Trail”
Season Unleashed is a collection of new poems by award-winning novelist and poet Anna Odessa Linzer. Published by Empty Bowl Press, with a cover photo by the author, the book is beautifully rendered. To describe these poems as a celebration of place, of the Pacific Northwest, is true, but inadequate. It is an extended love letter to the places Linzer has called home, to her people, and, through her poetry, to us. In her preface, Linzer reflects: “These poems and prose passages are a kaleidoscope of seasons that I have danced through. That have danced through me. That I carry with me.” This collection is a Master Class in attention, in appreciation; it is an invitation to experience what it feels like to listen and tune oneself to nature. To a life unleashed.
I slipped into the poems as one enters the water—toes first, evaluating, and then proceeding—a contemplative wading or an exuberant plunge. However I arrived, the experience was the same: immersive. Her poems are imbued with the colors, characters, scents and sounds so recognizable to those of us who live in this area: birds, plants and trees are known and named, affectionately, like family. Her description of the Hoh is strong enough to make me question my memories—to compel my return to notice what I missed amidst the deluge. But I do recall the moments of awe, as she relates in “The Hoh”: “At the openings / to the river’s song, sun flashes off the water, splashes through / branches, lighting scales of bark, lady fern, deer fern, sword / fern, salal, and vine maple. . . . I feel the / tender tendrils of spruce roots stir against my heart.”
Emotional resonance is a through-line. In her world, troubles are not “The Troubles” of Ireland, but the manageable, or at least distractible, troubles of her grandchildren. After an outing at the beach, of witnessing “the sky blooms two adult eagles . . . teachers in a dancing diving fishing / school” for their brood, “the Troubles sigh and / fall into a deep slumber, dreaming us all into the evening.” There is also the quiet, inconsolable trouble that Linzer captures with spare grace in “Flowers and Moons,” the title a nod to the epigraph that prompted it: “Walking in moon’s light / I seek white fragrant flowers / For fresh covid graves.”
The poems are grouped by seasons; opening with Spring, of course, and a “False Start”—an experience so familiar—the memory of which is still a bit tender. But perhaps Spring always feels a bit tenuous. Yesterday’s high of 57 followed by a low of 36. Linzer captures that in-between sensibility in “Last of the Sky:” “Winter weary fern / bent, broken, flattened / against the forest floor. / Above, tender blossom and leaf: / Indian plum, wild currant, ocean spray.” This dynamic plays out in our families, as well. In “Perfections,” Linzer writes: “I look at my granddaughters / and think, / Where did you come from? / you beauties, / you perfections. / How can this be?”
“The Girl Who Always Thought It Was Summer” is the season opener for Summer: Linzer at five, sighted and reported to her mother by her best friend: “a little girl in the snow in a swimsuit and a bathing / cap, small bare feet.” “Water, Breath” is a poem that distills the experience of Summer; it would be enough if it only consisted of the last line:
coiled ribbons of kelp
caught against the dock
heartbeat of water
grey skies
grey bay
touched only
by green fingers of fir branches
soft breath of breeze
call of a gull
alive, alive, alive.
“Northwest Endless Summer” is the lead-in to Fall, an acknowledgment of changing climate patterns and her associated “unease,” as the sun, “relentless in its giving” extends into “the white light of October.” Still—disquiet aside—I lingered on the poem’s opening lines, recalling, imagining the abundance: “Summer split full open in July, spilling tomatoes and blossoms, / washing in warm water that brightly holds fractured sunlight by / day, ribbons of moonlight by night.” In “Almost Forgetting,” I hear a reminder of the power of presence, of the deep engagement in an activity that dispels, if only temporarily, discontent and the stress of things we can’t control: “. . . I feel the dark bats of discontent / fly from the window of the attic / I call my mind. / Only golden yellow / only green / only the gift of soil / and rain and forest / and something as pure and bright / and unknowable in its trueness / as love.”
Linzer: “These poems and prose passages are a kaleidoscope of seasons that I have danced through. That have danced through me. That I carry with me.”
In “Within a Season,” Winter arrives “Corpse-heavy and still as death / the grey laden sky presses down / on flat waters reflecting grey back to grey, / as if the thrust of winter against the fading fall / had drained all color, like blood, / from the beach, from the world, from the heavens.” For me, this is the season of wondering, of questions without answers, a sensibility Linzer shares in “December’s Totem.” Observing a group of cormorants standing on pilings, she writes: “Yellow beaks reach skyward. / Wings open wide, giving breasts to the sun. // What ancient silent prayer, what pleading is this? // If we spoke the same language still. . .” In “Snow, A Week and Counting,” weather humor and delightful imagery provide relief: “Fog rises from the pond, / as if the snow and ice / had taken wing, / or as if the pond was snowing upward / to the heavens / to replenish clouds, surely dry and empty now. . . .”
Winter, and this collection, conclude, as begun [in her Preface], in dance. “The Seasons Dancing Through Us” sets the stage: “The set design is changed: the play of yellow and golds is lit with / low muted light. . . .” Linzer sees the change of scene and characters as “a traveling act,” observing “the set here will / change and change again in anticipation and imagination, until all / that remains is the empty stage, and shards of winter's cold, clear / light and stark vestiges of the season’s glory litter the sight lines. / Yet even the darkest shapes silently hold next year’s story in bud / and branch, water and sky, heavy dark loom of earth. . . . we already dream the unimaginable return. A return / that is never a return. Always new.”
Linzer’s poems are a reminder of what is essential, what is worth attending to: the play of light, the complexity of the forest and its multitudes, the cycle of seasons, our core relationships, the dreams and the dancing. Reading this collection has been a call to attention, to consideration of how I would “spend my days,” as Annie Dillard put it. I find it amusing? ironic? that one of my garden nemeses (thistles) headlines a poem so joyful, so full of being. I imagine myself, as Linzer imagines the scene in “Thistles,” a spring-fed pond, my day filled with “cattails and tree frogs and yellow irises.” Season Unleashed is my prompt to find the poetry in the wild, invasive things in my life. This perspective, this possibility . . .“Just in time. Just on time.”
Nina Burokas is a writer and educator exploring the intersection of art, nature and the human spirit. She lives on Quimper Peninsula, the original territory of the Chemakum People, where she cultivates bird song, words and wonder. An adjunct business instructor at Mendocino College in California, Nina has been a contributing author/editor for five digital business titles.
SEASON UNLEASHED
By Anna Odessa Linzer
ISBN: 978-98837014
Empty Bowl Press
2232 West Valley Road,
Chimacum, WA 98325
Publishers Website: https://www.emptybowl.org/
Link to Title: https://www.emptybowl.org/store/p/season-unleashed-anna-odessa-linzer
2024, paperback, 108 pages, $18.00