Seasons (2024)

Seasons sets four poems by the writer and film director, Dictynna Hood. Each poem is strongly linked to a season, beginning with Winter and ending with Autumn. I was struck by the haunting images and what I heard as the ‘music’ in the poems. Sometimes otherworldly and at other times observational, they are rich in shifts of mood and contrast.

Winter begins with a crystalline melody set high in the piano. There is a distance and loneliness here.

In Spring (also titled Eostre hymn) there is a line towards the end of the poem ‘Praise. Praise. Praise.’ I have used this as a refrain throughout. The imagery if joyful and this song is fast paced.

Dictynna’s Summer is decadent and I have responded directly to this with lazy, falling lines in the voice surrounded by filigree piano at the extremes of high and low- a kind of aural ‘organza’ referred to in the poem.

Autumn has an ancient quality to it- connected to people from long ago, the cycle of life and the seasons. It opens with the line ‘Bring out our dead’. The piano tolls throughout with a sort of relentlessness. The vocal line, free against this, has a desperate quality to it- hinting towards hope (and spring) at its close.