Encore Seasons (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781597131827)

Encore Seasons is a poetic exploration of nature's diverse moods and the web of life. The collection began when the author and his wife moved from their long-time home on Florida's Braden River to an apartment in a large college campus-like retirement community in Maryland. There, Bennett experienced a new array of enchanting seasonal ecosystems and observed―while overlooking a forested courtyard and exploring nearby trails―the natural landscape as it evolved through the changing seasons. Concise and lyrical poems emerged from his observations, study, and meditation, with his poetic imagery becoming focused through the lens of a biologist. The subjects are nature, its plants, and its animals, from those on an apartment balcony to those in the woods and around campus as the seasons changed. Many poems morphed into metaphors inspired by the biblical admonitions "to bloom where you are planted" and that "to everything there is a season." The poems are collected in chronological sections: "Prelude," "Autumn," "Winter," "Spring," and "Summer." "Mockingbird Interlude" is a longer poem narrating the natural history of a mockingbird throughout the four seasons. Encore Seasons blends science, poetry and evocative musings about nature and encore retirement. The poems in the collection reflect Bennett's belief that both the arts and the sciences inform our experiences and our appreciation in our unending exploration of nature and our own lives.