Too readily one may be deceived into supposing that Jeanne
Shannon writes merely graceful, easy nature poems. For it is true that her syntax is
clear, that her images are vivid and accurate, and that the sound of her lines displays
the very substance of poetry, its essential music. Yet these poems, like all fine poetry,
require a reader who is willing to go half-way to meet them, to assume a fully
contributing role in the evocation of meaning and feeling. Moreover, the beauty of the
work invites such participation.
In this the poems seem related to the haiku, to which her work
has often been compared. Regrettably, English readers too frequently imagine that form to
be a simple seasonal description useful for an elementary school introduction to poetry,
forgetting that the great masters exercised extraordinary clarity and sensitivity of
perception and had often had a long acquaintance with life before they felt ready to
devote themselves to the art. Jeanne Shannon's work, like theirs, is securely based on
clear seeing, on mature thought. It is the achievement of a lifetime.
I think of certain stanzas of "Interstices" as
illustration of the kind of attentiveness her work requires.
Red roses bloomed on the wallpaper in the bedroom at Oakleigh House. Blue paua shell
rings in the shape of stars and crescent moons for sale in the gift shop. The tour guide
spoke of summers long ago, when Yellow Fever took a thousand lives.
She thought of her life as a cup of electrum, alloy of gold and silver.
Red roses blooming are real flowers. Wallpaper is man-made.
The bedroom suggests human love making. Oakleigh seems a half-natural name. Paua shells
are real, and so are the shapes of stars and the crescent moon, suggesting a nighttime
human excitement and an increasing (crescent) feeling. Yet these are rings for sale in a
gift shop. Summer is one of our earthly seasons. It is probably an uninterested tour
guide doing his job who speaks of human life and death. And in the third stanza, the real
life of the persona is artificially constructed, an alloy, though the ore is real-gold and
silver-made into a cup, suggesting woman.
And in "Orchard, Grove," "hard rain in the
afternoon," a plain fact, stands next to an abstract observation about language:
"the most beautiful word/ in the world/ is mulberry," as the fact of the tree
itself, the grove called up, becomes as real as the rain.
This is a remarkably demanding and beautiful collection of
poetry. I am grateful for the translations of Hideo Yokokawa which now make the poems
available in a country whose literary tradition understands how to appreciate and welcome
them for what they are, what they express.
BACK