Jaguar Rain: the Margaret Mee Poems

Poetry. "Wonder and hunger to know things drive Jan Conn's JAGUAR RAIN. Wonder draws her as a scientist and writer into the forest of Brazil where she marvels both at life's inventiveness and at the story of the gifted botanist-artist Margaret Mee who hunted orchids in Brazil from the 1950s to the 1980s. So the self in these poised riotous poems is split, the vision compounded, layered. Conn wonders simultaneously at the world she sees firsthand and at teh character of a woman fearless to see more, at the intricacies of plants and insects and those of the imagination, at the rampant forest and the human mind. JAGUAR RAIN is a powerful celebration of both nature and art"--John Steffler. Jan Conn lives in Barrington, Massachusetts. She is a scientist whose current biological research focus is on the population of malaria mosquitoes in the Brazilian Amazon. Field work has taken her there since 1973. JAGUAR RAIN is her sixth book of poems. In 2003 a selection of her Amazonian poems won second prize in the CBC Literary Awards.