The collection features expansive poems that delve into deep introspection while embodying a sense of hard-won lightness. The award-winning author explores themes of personal experience and emotional depth, creating a vibrant tapestry of thought and feeling. Each poem invites readers to reflect on their own journeys, offering a unique blend of weight and buoyancy.
Drawing on works of art spanning four thousand years and from across the globe, this book explores the fundamental role of touch in human experience, and offers new ways of looking.
Set against the backdrop of Vancouver Island, Jane Munro's poetry intricately weaves the natural landscape with poignant memories and dreams. Her verses reflect a deep connection to the local ecosystem, capturing its essence through vivid imagery of mists, mosses, and flora. The collection explores personal history, including visits to her father's boatyard and dreamlike encounters with her mother, culminating in the powerful poem "Moving to a Colder Climate." Munro's exceptional acuity and musicality create a compelling exploration of presence and memory.
"When Jane Munro's husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the Griffin-award-winning poet must chart a path through the depths of grief, learning to live with loss and to take solace and find freedom in the restorative powers of writing. Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life--two lives--when Munro's husband Bob, twenty years her senior, is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Evoking Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow--the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death; the exhaustion of caretaking; and the regret in seeing life's scope narrow and diminish. Written with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it means to care for a husband who is gradually but devastatingly deteriorating. Her identity as a writer, yoga practitioner, mother and grandmother, are all eclipsed by a single word--caregiver. When a doctor admonishes, 'What job could be more important than caring for your husband?' Munro wonders if the same question would be asked if the roles were reversed, and her husband was asked to put aside all his own needs in order to care for a wife with dementia. Ultimately, Munro finds respite in the power of writing, Iyengar yoga and in the rhythms of the moon--not to heal but to allow her to face grief without breaking. A poignant evocation for anyone who has experienced loss, Open Every Window reveals the pain and power inherent in loving and being loved. Framed with short observations of the moon--from a New Moon in Pune, India to the following New Moon in Vancouver, Canada--this memoir will entrance with its lyricism and comfort with the writer's hard-won warmth and wisdom."-- Provided by publisher