Jaguar Rain is a rare text: at once a book of stand-alone poems and a work of scholarship, with textual notes and bibliography. Written in the voice of Margaret Mee (naturalist, explorer, and painter of flowers in the Amazon between 1956 and 1988), the poems are infused with wonder at a discovered new world of extraordinary richness, which is also an old world still governed by myth, and the ecological interdependence of everything: plant, animal, human, god; the living and the dead. Sources for this collection include Mee’s journals, sketchbooks, and paintings. Jan Conn is a scientist by education and occupation, but biologist meets poet in the deep dive into the soul of the rainforest. She creates the Amazonian world from inside, from her own ardent research travels there, as well as through the sharp eyes of Margaret Mee.

Will the boat come back for me? Nights
on this rocky island a possum steals my fish

and the phosphorescent eyes of a coral shark slide
back and forth across the sandy shallows, sleepless,

ravenous. Days I watch wasps
construct paper nests like miniature pots,

the hinged lids ingenious. …

from “Aripuana”