Jaguar Rain

The Margaret Mee Poems

by Jan Conn

tagged: canadian

Description

Jaguar Rain is a rare text: at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography. Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered new world of extraordinary richness, which is also an old world still governed by myth, and the ecological interdependence of everything: plant, animal, human, god; the living and the dead. Sources for this collection include Mee’s journals, sketchbooks, and paintings. Jan Conn is a scientist by education and occupation, but biologist meets poet in the deep dive into the soul of the rainforest. She creates the Amazonian world from inside, from her own ardent research travels there, as well as through the sharp eyes of Margaret Mee.

About the Author

Jan Conn

Contributor Notes

Jan Conn was brought up in Asbestos, Quebec. She now lives in Great Barrington, Massachusetts and works as a professor of Biomedical Sciences whose research is focused on mosquitoes, their evolution and ecology. She has published seven previous books of poetry.

Editorial Review

"Conn's science is a call to encounter the world through the medium of the self and its perceptions, whatever they may be, to record them without prejudice, and to display them as a record of the wonder of human and evolutionary experience. She has successfully taken on the death-traps of late romantic poetry and has shown how they might be re-imagined in a combined aesthetic and empirical frame."--Harold Rhenisch, The Malahat Review

"Conn understands that language is like a flare, not only an illuminating device, but something filled with meaningful, life-saving potential ... Conn's verbal panache invests Mee's life with importance ... "--Ian Letourneau, Northern Poetry Review

" ... A heroic act of heroine recovery ... Conn's jungle-lush language recalls the Michael Ondaatje of Running in The Family but her deliberate diction also echoes Elizabeth Bishop."--George Elliott Clarke, The Halifax Chronicle-Herald

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