The Collection
Seasons In Poetry
Forty-eight poems. Four seasons. One year of paying close attention.
About the Collection
Seasons In Poetry is a gathering of forty-eight poems arranged in the order of the year — beginning with the tentative greens of early spring and ending in the deep quiet of midwinter. Each poem is a moment of attention: a morning fog, a particular slant of October light, the sound of ice forming on a still pond.
This is not a book about nature in the abstract. It is a book about specific things — the way a certain field looks in late July, the smell of woodsmoke on a November evening, the surprising tenderness of a February thaw. Ed Robertson writes from decades of close observation, and the poems carry that weight of accumulated noticing.
Readers have described Seasons In Poetry as a book to return to — one poem at a time, in the season it belongs to, as a companion to the turning year.
From the Pages
Spring
God
Light
The dew on a blade of grass at dawn
The colors of the spectrum
And those we have yet to see…
Summer
Dreamy Brown Eyes
With the air
Of the softest cloud
With the glow
Of stars in the night sky
Your Dreamy Brown Eyes
Speak to me…
Fall
Autumn Vespers
The amber light of October
falls soft on waiting pages,
and every leaf that drifts to earth
becomes a word the season says.
Winter
Dealing With This Water
I'm in a flood
Washed away
one log rolls by I grab on
hope…
The Four Seasons
Spring
12 poems
Poems of beginning — returning birds, the tentative green of early April. Spring in this collection is not triumphant but tentative, full of the fragile hope of things that might not last.
Summer
12 poems
Poems of abundance and labor — haying, swimming holes, the long evenings of July. Summer here is physical and warm, full of the particular textures of a life lived close to the land.
Fall
14 poems
The heart of the collection — fourteen poems of harvest, letting go, and the bittersweet beauty of things passing. Fall is where Robertson's voice is most fully itself: elegiac, precise, and quietly luminous.
Winter
10 poems
Poems of stillness and endurance — the patience of frozen fields, the intimacy of long nights, the strange comfort of a world reduced to its essentials. Winter is where the year comes to rest.
What Readers Are Saying
Robertson writes the way the seasons themselves move — without hurry, without waste, with an attention that makes you feel the world more vividly.
— Literary Journal Review
I keep this book on my nightstand and read one poem each evening. It has changed the way I look out my window.
— A reader
Precise, unhurried, and deeply felt. Seasons In Poetry is the kind of book that earns a permanent place on the shelf.
— Small Press Review