The Red Canoe by Jeanne Emmons

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.

–David Allan Evans, author of This Water, These Rocks

In a stunning tour-de-force of framing and attentiveness, the poems in The Red Canoe 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.

–Lee Ann Roripaugh, author of Dandarians

The Red Canoe 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.

 –Christine Stewart-Nuñez, author of Untrussed and Bluewords Greening