Janet Joyner is a native of South Carolina's Pee Dee region and belongs, perhaps, to the last generation before mechanized farming, a time when the work songs of harvesting tobacco were richly vowelled by the Gullah and Geechee women who did the work. In the fields. In the kitchens. In the nurseries. Her poetry sings with these cadences. Her themes, still rooted deeply to the land, its seasons, its creatures, ring with more modern and wider dichotomies which a life-time of studying and teaching French literature has enriched.
