ABOUT Janet McCann
Janet McCann is professor of English at Texas A&M University, where she has taught since 1969. Her poems have appeared in New York Quarterly, Southern Poetry Review, Poetry Australia, New Letters and other literary reviews and anthologies. She received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1989..
Emily's Dress
Janet McCann
"This book is a love-letter to Dickinson, while including poems on the savoring of letter-writing, photographs, and any mementos of time past. This entore chapbook allows McCann's spiritual nature to radiate images, meditations, feminine yearnings, and affections for female genius (even if an eccent4ic one).
--Sybil Pittman Estes
They Could Not
You could say she was untouched
by history. It was outside.
She ironed the heavy clothing and made jelly.
It could have been 1750 or now.
The jelly jars glowed garnet, ruby, amber.
History happened outside in the streets,
many died. Some survived a while,
she rolled bandages for them.
Always the quick glint of events
flashed elsewhere, without her.
People came and left. The round clock
replaced the Grandfather clock, and then
the digital replaced the round. The clock
told her the time outside, in history.
Within the box of the clock, she folded linens,
cottons, woolens. Put them in piles
in scented drawers. Bent and stood and bent
and straightened. Outside in history
they thought they could see her, could not,
she was inside all the time, the heart of the clock.
Copyright © Pecan
Grove Press,
1997-2003
For further information contact
H. Palmer
Hall.
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Most recent revision
November 11, 2003
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