Quatro Stadgioni

Long echoed down writerly halls is the oft heard but sporadically heeded advice, don’t hold anything back. Here, in Edin Viso’s second book of prose and poetry, there is no hesitation. The qualities of his mind and the experiences of his heart are laid bare. This is spiritual writing writ large, birthed by love and discipline; midwifed by, as Edin says, “an addiction to writing.” It may be helpful to note here that Edin’s prose style is distinctively conversational. Reading his prose is not unlike finding yourself at a table in the back room of a Beat coffee house, drinking strong black Java while listening to a friend spill out in one great sweep, ideas, memories and convictions. Taking the work as a whole, a reader will soon see that what we have here is an ebullient Balkan poet, who — having witnessed and absorbed the ravages of his country’s demolition, having experienced, even as he fled, his own dismantling, and then his “restoration of peace” — puts it all down with blunt intensity… Edin Viso has divided his literary house into four rooms. In the Show Room we are plunged into experiences of a dark and bitter past that admit finally to possibility… Never far from any dark page is the mystic/romantic, incurably hopeful in the power of love. Through the Tropic Room and Desert Room, there is progression; but it is the progression of life, never absolute — resembling a corkscrew rather than a ruler… There’s a minefield of surprising images here. Finally, in the Cool Room, we find an extended riff on God, love, Christ, a kind of stream-of-consciousnesstestimony that culminates in a tentative arrival: the recognition that God’s promised land is nowhere other than within… —Stephen T. Berg, from the Foreword