Premonition

March 5, 2014

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.