Jeanne Shannon, born on a farm in Virginia, will be at Page One Books at 3pm on Sunday, May 15, to talk about and sign her book of poetry and prose, Summoning.
The book is described as such: "A collection of poems and hybrid works that hover at the boundary between poetry and prose, and that range from the abstract and experimental to the concrete and accessible. Employing imagery that is vivid and frequently surprising, the author addresses subjects that include the natural world (especially the plant kingdom), art and music, the dreamlike regions of memory, and the mysterious—the 'dissolving forms' that tell us the world is stranger than we might suppose. In the title poem and others, she summons recollections of her early life in 1940s southwestern Virginia, 'the heart of Appalachia.'"
Shannon was born on a snowy morning on a farm in southwestern Virginia, “the heart of Appalachia,” when the Sun was in Aquarius and the Moon was in Taurus. She has lived in the west (Arizona and New Mexico) for most of her adult life. She writes poems that she characterizes as paintings—often impressionistic, sometimes abstract. It's hard to find one that does not contain a reference to a member of the vegetable kingdom, be it tree, weed or flower. She is pleased to claim Robert Beverley, historian of early Virginia whose name appears in Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Painting by Georgia O'Keeffe, as a maternal ancestor.
