Jane Munro is the author of five previous books of poetry, most recently Active Pass (2010) and Point No Point (2006). Her work has received the Bliss Carman Poetry Award, the Macmillan Prize for Poetry and been nominated for the Pat Lowther Award. She is a member of Yoko’s Dogs (Jan Conn, Mary di Michele, Susan Gillis, Jane Munro), a poetry collective whose first book Whisk was published in 2013. After living for twenty years on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island, she has now returned to Vancouver.
Judges’ Citation
Somewhere between the directness and clarity of haiku and Yeats’s ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing’ moves Jane Munro’s hauntingly candid explorations of the hard truths of growing old.
Somewhere between the directness and clarity of haiku and Yeats’s ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing’ moves Jane Munro’s hauntingly candid explorations of the hard truths of growing old. But Blue Sonoma unflinching as its poems are in their wrestling with a partner’s Alzheimer’s, with memory, death, and dying, and with the inexorable advance of time, achieves an engaging liveliness as a result of the poet’s earthy voice, colloquial wit, and acute descriptive powers. For Munro, language, travel, and art are the ‘props/in a little, local theatre of light’, and this theatre’s relationship to other worlds, other possible states of consciousness, repeatedly leavens Blue Sonoma’s painful content with wisdom and delicacy. In primarily short lines of impressive transparency, Munro’s writing, replete with natural images of Canada’s west coast, celebrates, even as it confronts with blunt honesty, the sensuous passage through the years towards whatever transition must follow. ‘And us, were we substance or reflection?’ The question hovers over this gathering of deeply meditative and viscerally felt poems and leads us, with gentleness but no apology, into the realm of riveting and ultimate contemplation.
Selected poems
by Jane Munro
5
The old man who picks up the phone
does not get your message.
Call again.
Please call again.
The cats leave squirrel guts
on the Tibetan rug.
Augury I cannot read.
You’ve got to talk with me.
I scrape glistening coils
into a dust pan,
spit on drops of blood and spray ammonia.
The blood spreads into the white wool.
I am so sick of purring beasts.
Don’t tempt me, old man.
Today I have four arms
and weapons in each hand.
Copyright © Jane Munro 2014
Old Man Vacanas
He totalled his blue truck –
slowly spun out on an icy bridge,
rammed it into a guard rail.
Climbed out unbruised.
Coal Creek. Middle of nowhere.
A passing couple brought him home.
Then three years
with letters from the Motor Vehicle Department
before he relinquished his license.
Before we met, while driving cab,
he broke his neck. It rewelded
off-kilter: head stuck forward.
Six years later, it’s that jut I suddenly see ahead.
It’s late, but for once no mist or fog. And on all
the twists and turns of that coastal highway,
its bluffs and coves, I am following
the spitting image of him
in that battered Sonoma –
its peeling paint, cracked brake lens,
the slumped driver silhouetted by my lights –
only the two of us on the road.
Copyright © Jane Munro 2014
Sonoma
On the drive to the respite hotel,
the Goldberg Variations: a bridge to peace.
Sora bidding farewell to Bash? –
Sora leaning forward on his elbow.
*
In the moment of leaving,
when words set sail from paper …
soul clings
to one burning
as fire clings to a stick.
*
Even when the mind’s a sieve,
soul doesn’t grieve –
cannot believe
in scarcity. A mountain,
a river – fully this,
fully that.
Copyright © Jane Munro 2014