Jane Munro
is a Canadian poet,
writer and educator
Jane Munro’s prose memoir is Open Every Window (Douglas & McIntyre, 2021). Her most recent poetry book is False Creek (Harbour Publishing, 2022). Munro’s sixth poetry collection Blue Sonoma (Brick Books) won the 2015 Griffin Poetry Prize. Her previous books include Glass Float (Brick Books), Active Pass (Pedlar Press), Point No Point (McClelland & Stewart) and Grief Notes & Animal Dreams (Brick Books).
The chapbook Straights and Narrows includes a new introduction by Jane Munro and a reprinting of the first 21 poems from her Active Pass collection.
Review of Open Every Window
by Dorothy F Lane in Canadian Literature
I devoured Jane Munro’s Open Every Window in short bites between departure lounges and waiting areas, savouring every morsel. It yokes Indian philosophy and contemporary Canadian life, incorporating several of Munro’s travels to South Asia before, during, and after her partner’s illness. During these travels, she picks up the thread of cyclical nature, opening with the quotation that “every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Munro’s memoir is in seven parts, and the ultimate section is a kind of revolving door—flying west, traveling east, dipping into the past of the house fire that takes her mother’s life, romantic relationships, children and grandchildren, and the inexorable loss of her husband to Alzheimer’s. “My life—my marriage. My home,” she writes near the beginning of the book (17). Living on the west coast of Canada, she alternates between depictions of forests and rocky shorelines and supernatural apparitions, interlacing transcriptions of her father’s letters from the 1940s, lists, and dialogues. Most remarkable, perhaps, is the attempt to see through the perspective of her husband in “Who is the Seer and Who the Seen?” When Bob recalls the loss of his own family members, the simplicity of his statement “[e]ven though you are familiar with losing people, it’s alarming” reminds us of that existential mystery: “Terrifying,” states Bob, “He’s here, and then—poof! . . . He’s gone” (215).
False Creek
Harbour Publishing
October 1, 2022
“Munro’s False Creek is illuminated by generous humanity and deft virtuosity … Alive to the worlds of dream and imagination, she also confronts the violence of history. Written by a poet at the top of her form, False Creek opens a cabinet of wonders.”
Anne Simpson, author of Speechless
“Jane Munro’s sanely observant eye, so evident in her Point No Point poems, now details with equal clarity her urban inhabitance. The short lines of these poems map her vision, from “in your hands, the weight of bone” to “False Creek/ Vancouver’s keel of grief” and out to “stars – where earth’s been and is going.” These are deeply necessary poems, a gift to readers.”
Daphne Marlatt author of Then Now
“With the grace of “water / the surprise / source of energy,” Jane Munro finds her way amidst the confluences of ecological disaster and despair, settler-Indigenous relations, and griefs of body and soul. Uncovering both dissonances in scale and resonances between human and planetary space and time, she corrects our sense of ourselves, urging us towards change. These often spare poems model the difficult but necessary practices of openness, curiosity, self-scrutiny, and show “where we’re at … what’s beyond us.”
–Maureen Scott Harris, author of Drowning Lessons and Slow Curve Out
