Traces in Water
Conflux Press, 2010 



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Traces in Water begins with the lines: “A conjurer stands/outside the door.” Janet Jennings—a gifted poet—is the conjurer. She writes with elegance and luminosity. Images of dream and water soar yet are grounded in the images of the poet’s twin daughters, their world where “Living close to the ground/can change things.” This is a book of magical moments steeped in the present as well as the past, a book where orb spiders spin and a sand dollar becomes “an ivory disk fallen from the moon.” Read slowly and savor these beautiful poems.

From the Earl of Desmond to mermaid-daughters to the lovely image of a grandmother and a moon-colored doe, these poems shimmer with a drift of mystery, and a splash of the surreal.  Imaginative, original and enticing, I want to go there, and I want to read more.

The poems in Traces in Water are dream-worlds of immense mystery and delight. On a night of bells, a conjurer waits at the threshold; in a grotto, winged fish flutter in the wind; a moon-lit doe steps from a grandmother’s marrow. Through the portal of Jennings’s sultry notes of jazz, evocations of myth and legend, and the pulsing filament linking mother and daughter, she takes her reader “spinning between/the laws on the black edge,” where “nothing unfolds as expected.” One awakens feeling grateful.