In the Palace of Creation: Selected Works 1969-1999

Janine Canan is a poet of questing imagination and seemingly endless originality. For over thirty years her poetry has appeared in magazines, anthologies, and in her ten published collections, beginning in 1977 with Of Your Seed (Oyez: Berkeley) and ending with her incomparable Changing Woman (Scars: Chicago, 2000). Now with the publication of In The Palace of Creation, her readers can for the first time experience the full range of her poetry in a single collection. Wisely selected by poet and editor Susan Hahn, the poems in this volume bear witness to the evolution of Canan’s creative voice from 1969 to 1999. Here the reader will find simple poems like "Before the Storm" which testify to Canan's enduring love of nature; metaphorically complex poems like "The Abandoned Garden" which are both erotic and sorrowful; poems like "Wild Music," modeled after the lyrics of the great Hindu mystical poet Mirabai, which reveal the most intimate depths of Canan's spiritual life; and poems like "At the Vulva Stone," written to the Great Goddess and ardently feminist while never ceasing to be sensuous and lyrical.

Canan has been influenced by Sappho, Emily Dickinson, Anna Akhmatova, Carolyn Kizer, and Denise Levertov. The reader will find poems to all of them here as well as Canan's translations of poems by Else Lasker-Schüler, Marguerite Yourcenar, and Mirabai. This is an unusually rich collection. Perhaps Canan herself best captures the spirit of it when she says in her long prose meditation "A Good Laugh": "beauty is created constantly everywhere . . . The whole is a splendid vast writhing joyous and suffering Serpent, shedding her skin as She wiggles along, perpetually revealing a new Self that rises out of her own pure delight."