Jane Munro is a Canadian poet, writer, and educator. She is the author of the prose memoir Open Every Window, and the poetry collections False Creek, Blue Sonoma, winner of the 2015 Canadian Griffin Poetry Prize, Glass Float, Active Pass, Point No Point, and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams. 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 who have published Whisk, Rhinoceros, and Caution Tape. Munro has taught Creative Writing at universities, led writing workshops, and given readings across Canada, in the USA, England, Ireland, Italy, Egypt, and India. 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.
Selected poems
by Jane Munro
3
A fire on the hearth, lantern by the bed,
kitchen candelabra in a draft.
Finger of light on an arm of the bench.
One of the cats watching it beckon.
We have met the lion of March.
Today, her tongue abrades my back.
Outside, excuses pile up.
Snow like lamb’s wool
sliding down windows.
Posts with stockings about their ankles.
I tuck my hands into my sleeves.
Ravens carry twigs
to their nest in a double-headed cedar.
We who are paired. Even his lips are cold.
Thanks to beams and rafters,
the house becomes a whale.
The miles of intestines facing Jonah.
Copyright © 2014 by Jane Munro, Blue Sonoma, Brick Books
Old Man Vacanas
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 © 2014 by Jane Munro, Blue Sonoma, Brick Books
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 © 2014 by Jane Munro, Blue Sonoma, Brick Books
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 © 2014 by Jane Munro, Blue Sonoma, Brick Books