Many of the poems in this experimental collection offer soft explosions of images, wordcollages, mixing colors and sounds, emotions and ideas. Others are more straightforward and accessible narratives. There are tributes to impressionist artists and to musicians and music, natural descritions and landscapes, as well as autobiographical moments. Some of the poems are concrete, presenting visual images on the page. The poems are for the most part sensual, although many are given to ideas, including an entire section devoted to the Canonical Hours.
Jeanne Shannon grew up on Southwest Virginia, what some call "the heart of the Appalachian South," and that region still provdes inspiration for her creative work. She earned a bachelor's degree in education (majors in music and French) at Radford University (Radford College, it was then, 1956), and a master's degree in English/Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico in 1983. Her poetry, memoir pieces and short fiction have appeared in numerous small-press and university publications. She has published four full-length collections of her work and several chapbooks. When she retired from a career as a technical writer in 2000, she started a home-based business--a book-publishing enterprise called The Wildflower Press--in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Her favorite authors include Southern fiction writer Lee Smith, poets Charles Wright, C.D. Wright, and Ronald Johnson, and novelists Virginia Woolf and Eudora Welty. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies are among her favorite novels. She also likes to read books on quantum physics and spirituality, and to explore how those two fields are related.
