Your Good Hat

Kimberly Fahner is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the Memorial
University of

Newfoundland.

Reading Barbara Munk’s collection of poetry is like experiencing the
rhythms of someone else’s life. This is not entirely as voyeuristic as
it sounds, though, because the eavesdropping is strangely familiar in
that her poems are universal in their particularity. While a number of
pieces are set in Munk’s home stomping ground of Northern British
Columbia, the fragments of overheard conversations and the images of the
people living their lives will undoubtedly strike chords of familiarity.

The ability to find poetry in some of the least expected places seems
to be one of Munk’s creative gifts. In “The Garbage Can Man,” she
writes of a homeless man who is “the ultimate poet.” In her mind, he
is “no ordinary tramp”; instead, she searches for “the poem in
him,” and later wonders if he is “an artist / without a canvas / or
a poet without a poem.” Munk sees social issues reflected in personal
ones, as in “Sisters,” a poem depicting the chilling implications of
domestic abuse. She does not shrink from topics that are, unfortunately,
a part of everyday life; all rhythms of life are significant, even if
they are unsettling.

Indeed, although she longs for “a life less complicated,” the
complex process of living is what gives her the most telling poems.
There is an awareness of ancestry and continuity, of people and places.
From the clever juxtaposition of age in “Ambrose Jackson Bruxton and
King Thomas,” to the meticulous record keeping of “The Huble Clan
Reunion,” to the tender tribute “In Memorium Martha Huble,” Munk
shows us that the cadences of life and death should be respected and
honored. In the title poem, Munk begins, “The point is / we are born
alone / and die alone.” While the statement is, quite undeniably, true
in a rather raw sense, Munk’s poetry focuses not on the dead but on
the living. The ghosts of the dead may populate her poetic spaces, but
even they are lively ghosts who weave stories that link one generation
to the next—through memory and landscape.