The Red Canoe - by Jeanne Emmons (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>Jeanne Emmons's Red Canoe is a mode of both transporation and transformation, an eye, ear, and mouth by which the world is perceived, and a metaphor for the mystery of the imagination.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br><p>In Jeanne Emmons's poetry collection, The Red Canoe, the canoe becomes a mode of both transportation and transformation and a metaphor for the mystery of the poetic imagination. The poems move between the point of view of the poet who owns the canoe and the consciousness of the canoe itself as it glides on the lake, bumps against the dock it is tied to, or lies on the bank beneath a blanket of snow. The canoe becomes an eye, ear, and mouth by which the world is perceived, taking in the seasons in succession and ruminating on its own limitations and dreams. Like the spider's web that forms in the canoe overnight, the canoe is a trembling net, ready to catch "the least sailing mayfly of possibility" that might become caught in its consciousness. The canoe craves recognition and attention, flirting like Marilyn Monroe, and smiling like a lipsticked mouth. But it also feels overexposed and wants to withdraw and retreat from the honking geese that surround it. Aware of how conspicuous it is within the muted colors of the natural landscape, it wishes not to be red, much as its poet owner is wary of being "read." The canoe is alone, yet it is half aware of an unseen force paddling it. It desires to be free, even as it knows that its very nature implies limitations. The canoe questions its urge to transmute reality, "does not know/ why everything has to be compared to be/ fully grasped," but is unable to stop itself from engaging in a "tangle of connections." The red canoe gradually emerges as a metaphor for consciousness itself and for not only the poetic imagination but also the human condition - aspiring, limited, and self-aware.</p><p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br><p>The late poet Galway Kinnell wrote of the poet's "capacity to go out to [things] so that they enter us, so that they are transformed within us, and so that our inner life finds expression through them." The poems here powerfully and subtly substantiate that kind of transformation. The canoe becomes a living, breathing thing, a watcher and listener, aware not only of troubling thoughts the mind can arouse, but that "each drop of rain is a guest in my house," and that a tiny spider's web can "capture the least sailing mayfly/of possibility." The red canoe finds out, as poets do that "everything has to be compared to be/ fully grasped . . . has to be held/in a tangle of connections." The connections in these poems are quite often astonishing. </p><p><strong>--David Allan Evans</strong>, author of <em>This Water, These Rocks</em></p><p> </p><p>In a stunning tour-de-force of framing and attentiveness, the poems in <em>The Red Canoe </em>shape-shift their way through seasonal perspectives like a flip-book of time-lapse photography. Melding together the stillness of intense focus with movement throughout the field of a held frame, these meditative poems both mesmerize and surprise with their crisp painterly images, gorgeously-welded music, and passionate interiors. </p><p><strong>--Lee Ann Roripaugh</strong>, author of<em> Dandarians </em></p><p> </p><p><em>The Red Canoe </em>is playful and poignant, philosophical and feisty. Emmons enters conversations of art with ekphrastic-like still life as if the red canoe sat for a portrait series, yet these distilled lyrics dialog with literary predecessors as well. The red canoe is a symbol for the speaker, a synecdoche for woman, and a syntax for nature. Like the canoe in "Red Canoe Having Ideas," the poet is "open-hearted / harboring in the red slit / of her body a bright / leaf-shaped segment of sky." Jeanne Emmons is an extraordinary poet of the ordinary world.</p><p><strong>--Christine Stewart-Nunez</strong>, author of<em> Untrussed </em>and <em>Bluewords Greening</em></p><br>
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