Apple Answers for Orange Questions

by Seymour Jacklin

"Apple Answers for Orange Questions" is a collection of poems mainly written between 2017 and 2019: a shadowed period with a lived experience of health struggles, insomnia, anhedonia, and anxiety. I suppose they were a way to reclaim a foothold. They are not dark poems, however, for they chart my return to the body after a long absence and scale the themes of what emerged as true and worth keeping. My memory is very fragmented and un-sequenced. It's an attic full of scattered papers that I rarely visit, but these poems are scraps I have saved. Their raw materials are Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and Light. They broadly chart a growing orientation towards the material body in its place and time, frequently tugging on its string, like a kite that wants to be up and away.

53 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 28, 2023

About the author

Seymour Jacklin is the author and voice behind the "Stories from the Borders of Sleep" podcast (www.bordersofsleep.com ). His literary heroes include George MacDonald, Henry Williamson, Paul Gallico, Ursula Le Guin and Alice Oswald.

Reviews

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seymour isn’t merely a poet. He’s a mystic alive to his world, which becomes our world, and together, the world. The most satisfying collection I’ve read in quite some time. Utterly lacking in the presumptive self-importance of so much contemporary poetry, he brings a considered, nuanced vulnerability bred equally in tears and pictures; snapshots of eternity found in his existential connection to his own environment.

Treat yourself to these gems. I’m glad I did.