Brick Books, 2020
Jane Munro’s Glass Float is a book that almost
seems to float easily and beautifully in either air or water, taking readers on
a voyage around the world, but also on a journey that leads us more deeply
within ourselves as we read through the poems. She sets the tone with her
epigraph, using a quotation from David J. Chalmers, who has written: “Conscious
experience is at once the most familiar thing in the world and the most
mysterious.” In her poetry, Munro asks us to consider what we see, but then to
go beyond that in a closer exploration of our own lives. She asks us, too, to
think about how we are woven together—despite any potential emotional walls or
boundaries, and despite perceived and imagined distances or physical
geographies—through the very fabric of our shared spirit and humanity.
Readers who are regular yogis will find poems that
speak to them in intimate ways. In “You Hear Their Words,” the poet writes:
“You ask Guruji, How can you be within and without at the same time?” Guruji’s
response to his student is lovely: “you stop heading out and head in…spread your
consciousness on the inside/of your body like a carpet in your room.” If you’ve
been to a yoga retreat at any point, you’ll recognize the metaphor of practice
in Munro’s series of yoga-centric poems. In “Decentralize Mind,” Geeta’s advice
is to “Spread intelligence to all parts at once—be aware of toes and/hips and
navel and neck.” In “If It Were A Vitamin Pill, You’d Take It,” Geeta tells her
students that “Finding yourself is finding your soul” and—even more
profoundly—“In the city of yourself, everything’s a work in progress.” Students
of yoga will know this is more true than they often care to admit. After all,
you can go to your ‘edge’ in a pose, but sometimes you need to have a chat with
your ego to stop from going too far.
In Glass Float, there are so many poems that
sing with clear and strong voices. In “Hearing Aids,” a woman’s husband loses
his hearing aids after spending “all morning cutting down a couple/of trees and
clearing brush.” His wife goes outside, “stopped thinking and let her feet take
her.” She somehow almost miraculously finds the hearing aids in amidst a pile
of sawdust. How has she even managed to find them, the reader wonders? She
says, “I’m absolutely clear it wasn’t me who found them./My body was just an
agent.” Munro goes on in the poem to say that there is a “visceral click—the
embodied knowing—and the attention to/what is not produced at the level of
habitual mental ruts.” These moments of ‘embodied knowing,’ as Munro calls
them, are sometimes the loveliest bits of magic in a person’s life. They happen
so rarely that they resonate deeply, and often for a very long time.
There is also the simple and profound beauty of “Us.” In
that poem, a baby says “bubbles,” while “looking/out the window at snowflakes,”
and an “old man tears up.” The poet writes of these two human characteristics,
of speaking and weeping, and leaves the reader with a “both/move me/are you
moved/by words—by tears.” Yes. How could one not be? Then, in “You Soften
Toward Him,” Munro writes of being in a yoga class where the teacher says
“Learning pranayama takes patience. This society doesn’t/teach patience.
You are all impatient for success.” In these pandemic days, we are all learning
patience, and so Munro’s words may speak and resonate even more clearly with
her readers.
A glass float is something that’s meant to keep a
fishing net afloat. It is also like a person in so many ways, and Munro writes
that both have boundaries and are equally fragile. The title poem speaks of the
importance of how we make things with our breath and our hands, of how that
very act of creation—of making—has great value. As Munro writes at the end of
that poem, “We can change what we make—within what horizon/we place the past.”
We always have the choice to explore new horizons, or not. Hers is a poetry of
being mindful and observant, and of considering the rewards of the depths instead
of the ease of spending time in the shallows. The poet’s yogic practice is
woven into her work, and—for readers who write—there is an echo of that creative
and intuitive practice in the way in which writers tend to imagine and write. Jane
Munro’s Glass Float is buoyant in its reminder to readers that they
should be mindful of the present, while always trusting to look forward to
curiously and adventurously exploring their own new horizons.
