Jehanne’s poetic ‘voice’ is as deeply inspired by seasons, land, and elements as are her songs. Then there is the added freedom of a natural-born linguist’s expressive range, and the added force of an unshakeable faith - a faith in the potential of phrase and metaphor to reach deep into the core of the challenge that it is to be human, to be an embodied soul.
Her poems are profoundly observant - of the natural details of leaf, light and wing as much as of the inner shades of pain, grief, joy or awakening. Her particular skill is the evocation of an intimacy between these realms, understanding each in terms of the other. It’s the intimacy of a lover or a shaman, and a passionate challenge to come home to deep connection and agency.
“These words… are the testimony of a woman who believes in the reality of resurrection as a potent force working upwards from within us, from within nature.”
RESURGENCE MAGAZINE
RECORDINGS & PUBLICATIONS
Jehanne has published several poetry pamphlets and books some of which can be ordered from the SHOP.
(A sample poem from each collection is shown on the page for that publication.)
Thistledown, a recorded collection of Jehanne performing a selection of her poems is available HERE.
She has also contributed to several anthologies. A full list of publications can be found HERE.
Roadside
While the sun flares from his high seat,
invisibly, too bright to know,
launching storms, continent wide,
pressure that shifts monsoons off their essential courses…
the Lady is in delicate labour everywhere,
making gardens of our debris.
She cannot help it… she’s for renewal at all costs.
No broken concrete or tumbled slabs of tarmac
too tight for the birthing of mallow, plantain
and the tall, crowned teazle.
Between crumbling bricks
she pushes thickets of purple buddleia:
(look quick now…
a slight brown bird flits into shadow)
and here, over rubble expanding,
a glaze of wild geranium, lilac pale
yellow fumitory seeping down walls,
uncheckable:
clover in white globes of sweetness for the bees
and slender nipplewort:
her intimate gifts gathering, concealing,
remaking our wastelands, under her wise green gown.
Slouching between sun and earth,
we cast our blindness sky high
and are deaf to the pulse under our soles…
while the habitable space between sky and ground
grows tighter.
But she does not stop,
Everywhere the Lady is in labour,
calling us, alerting us,
making gardens.
Published in “Walking Two Ways”
Sonnet
You are so far spread greater than you know:
You track the long trod dismal daily grey,
boned, kerbed and neatly boxed in a clay
border, heart blindfold, not even a toe
out of line, thinking unopened, slow
no wild verges; yoked to the straitened day;
But at the sluice, dreams, thronging the raceway,
Heave at the wet boards, lunging for the flow.
An angel pounds at your temples, stirs your gut;
the sheer light , landing, grips you like a crown.
He cannot bear these streams diverted, channels cut,
and you to yourself dim wasteland overgrown.
Will you turn the heavy winches of this gate,
before the terrible roar of your own soul breaks it down?
Published in "A Way To Meet"
Beltane in England
Oh, this festival of green,
rolling in torrents over the trees,
in the subtlest shades of surprise,
unfurling a boundless fertility:
saplings sprouting in bundles
from a smile wide as the woods,
dimpled with stitchwort and violets.
And we are expecting some
vast desert doom,
where our waste devours the wild
as we go down as into quicksand
with a last rictus of despair.
But She has other plans:
ivy, beech and birch leaves,
shaking out like handkerchieves
from her fat pockets;
leaf casings, rosy as lips,
littering the lanes,
and everywhere, She is agog
for love.
In the old cemetery even the graves
are beds of tufted grass,
inviting unheard of, secret conceptions.
Did you notice the daisies
eyeing you with sun-sharp intensity?
You could not slip out of this game,
even if you wanted to:
the bluebells are longing to explore
your toes,
and the footways are only
a temporary diversion,
surfaces to be reclaimed
by your feet,
in the wink of a green eye.
And the honey bees did not go far,
still weaving their rapid lemniscatory pollen dances,
behind the knotted veils,
waiting for our love-call
back to the hives.
A child in pink tights clambers onto a wall
and jumps.
Who knows where she will land,
wild clematis in her hair,
her core curriculum coiling green
from her schoolbag,
in long tendrils of exuberant vegetation?
And we are expecting some
vast and desert doom,
where our waste devours the wild
and we go down as into quicksand
with a last rictus of agony.
But oh, this festival of green,
riotous, rejoicing.
And are we now too old for love,
our loving days over?
As yet unpublished
