An Eyeful of Earth, An Eyeful of Ocean

In a poetic career of over fifteen years, Mandana Zandian has moved steadily toward wider and vaster arenas for her conceptualization and expression of love as the centerpiece of human existence. In her later compositions, one rarely comes across love as a domesticated feeling bound by blood relations or sanctioned by social institutions; rather, all that is left in a great many of her poems is a speaker and an addressee in naked mutual gaze, one speaking lovingly, the other absorbing love as if it were mother's milk for the soul, nurturing it, nourishing it, and being ennobled by it. In fact, we may venture to say that the figures stand in mutual contemplation of something vast and nameless within them, around them and between them - something that no language, no attempt at understanding can reach: that, in a word, is what Zandian's poetry calls love and celebrates in all its manifestations.