by Neil Leadbeater
Jan Conn is a Canadian poet, biologist and visual artist. She was born in southeastern Quebec and lives in western Massachusetts. Her poetry has received a CBC Literary Prize, the inaugural P. K. Page Founder’s Award, and in 2016 was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She works on the vector biology and evolution of Latin American mosquito vectors at the Wadsworth Center in Albany, NY. ‘Peony Vertigo’ is her tenth collection of poetry.
Why plant a peony in the title? It’s a good question with which to begin this review. In an interview with Chloe Hogan-Weihmann for The Malahat Review, Conn says that she chose the word peony because of the presence of a very lovely Japanese woodland peony in her garden. She also added that since a peony has many layers (of petals) it could, at a stretch, resemble a human cerebral cortex, and that this was perhaps something she was unconsciously considering at the time. This finds expression in the line ‘This morning my brain is programmed / to unfold its peony’. No mention is made of ‘vertigo’ in that interview but since people with vertigo feel as though they are actually spinning or moving, or that the world is spinning around them, it is, in a way, a fitting description of how the poems in this volume shift through imagined mental states moving almost effortlessly from one emotion or subject to another. At one stage the manuscript had many titles. It was only during the editing process that the final title came to Conn literally out of the blue.
A brief glance at the titles of the poems listed on the contents page reveals a specific focus on plants, weather, art and architecture, history and prehistory, psychology, people and places. Conn melds these subjects together to form a collage in verse that is multi-layered and lyrical, informed and focused. Structurally, the book opens with a poem titled ‘Early November’ and closes with one titled ‘Late Summer’. In the middle there is a sequence of poems described collectively as a lament and lyric for the internationally acclaimed Ukrainian-Brazilian novelist and short story writer, Clarice Lispector.
Several of the poems in this book are threaded through with memorable descriptions of the natural world: ‘blue jays hip-hopping / among black cherry and maple branches’, ‘a red-bellied woodpecker…chowing down the suet’, ‘a party of voles celebrating their discovery of Tulipa and Crocus Glanathus and Allium bulbs’, ‘orchids, born already art’, ‘the sound of water / fleeing down stairs of grass’. In one of my favourite poems, ‘The Red Oak’, Conn writes:
.
I sit nearby, or, ear pressed
.
against your bark, listen for the wild thrumming
of the world’.
.
Another poem that caught my attention was ‘Ironweed’, a plant hitherto unknown to me but native to the eastern part of the United States and Canada. Conn’s unorthodox approach to her subject matter is ingeniously spelled out in the opening lines which never fail to surprise us with the unexpected:
.
There is something in you of an iron-sided steamship
an architecture of unpliable stems, toothed
leaves, a crow’s nest of disk flowers
.
a pile of deep violet slippers
uplifted on junkyard stilts
.
stiff-kneed, towering overhead
as though dredged from some scrap-iron seabed…
.
There is much that is visual in this collection. Colour plays a big part in the kaleidoscope of images and ideas. It is present in the title ‘Study in Blue-Grey’ and in lines within her work where it is used as a descriptor of so many things.
.
In ‘Lascaux’ we travel back in time to the Palaeolithic cave paintings in the Dordogne region of southwestern France. Even here, Conn can identify with and relive in her imagination something of a life from the far distant past: ‘At the entrance to the first cave I slip inside the outline / of a cheval, dun-coloured, shaggy…’ in the belief that ‘we retain all the lives we’ve lost ergo / I must have been a prehistoric horse.’
.
Metamorphosis into some other being is a recurrent theme. In other poems, the narrator slips easily into the body of a trout or imagines some kind of transformation into an octopus.
.
Openings, (doorways, alleyways, roof-tops) perhaps signifying escape routes or the possibility of new beginnings, are a recurring theme. Sometimes these yield fruit, (at one point she flings open the doors of the continent) but at other times, like the ‘Many doors along Michigan Avenue’s Magnificent Mile’ they do not. A sense of wanting to escape from the past is evident in ‘Roller Coaster, A Hit, A Pint-Sized Devil Machine, Some Dark Chocolate’ she writes ‘Then I remembered to forget the small ugly town / where I was born and raised’. Later on in the same poem she writes: ‘Please be my high diving board I want to emerge from / my past tense and feel real’.
.
Whether Conn is writing about flora and fauna, science and humanity or zooming in on fleeting moments remembered from childhood, her multi-layered poems are the product of scientific observation and lyrical imagination and we are the richer for them.
.
.
Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His work has been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His latest publications are The Gloucester Fragments (Littoral Press, 2022) and Cityscapes and Other Poems (Cyberwit.net, Allahabad, India, 2023).
.
.
.
North of Oxford 