Daughters

Sally Perlman was a student of literature working in a Toronto business library.

Daughters is Jane Munro’s first published book. An earlier version won her the Macmillan Company of Canada prize in creative writing at the University of British Columbia. Mother of three, she is writing of women as much as daughters. The poems are centred on Poppi, a fictional character inspired by a woman Munro knew in Turkey. The poems read like stories, pieces of Poppi’s life. A Cretan, born at Knossos, Poppi meets an archeologist whom she marries in London: “Poppi flew to wed him / in a modern suburb, without procession / or priest, in a language she’d borrowed. / ‘At the end of the bus line, beyond the Tube / closed in with his parents — every day he went / to work and I stayed home: Mrs. Webster / with Mrs. Webster’.” They live for a while in Turkey then move to Canada. The book is divided into five sections based on these events.

Munro’s poetry is impressionistic, often descriptive: “In Ankara, they pasteurize milk / then pour it down the necks of dirty bottles / each day Poppi boils / and imbibes it like a curse.” Many of the poems have a rich earthy quality: “sitting / with her bum / pressed into dirt / (feet flat, knees up, / elbows out, teeth tight) /smiling ... / she says she is now / six years old” or “Women wander in the vase of themselves ...”; “The dragon suckles.” Munro is capable of fine imagery:

He dreams like a fish and curves away

from each carving. He flicks back and forth,

can go upstream on his own energy.

But the quality of the verse is uneven. On occasions the effusion of jagged images left me baffled: “Plucked of quills and their constellations, / she flies into the teeth of her own skin.”

This first book holds the promise of better work yet to come. Munro is an assured and confident writer who takes risks with language and is prepared to make herself vulnerable. Her work is refreshingly free of philosophic soul searching, and not weighted down by the heavy layers of symbolism that often mark academic poetry. At present she is working on a novel, again using Poppi as the central character. It is unusual for a poet to distance herself from her own experience by inventing a fictional character in this way. This, and her natural inclination to tell stories, leaves me with the impression that Jane Munro is at heart a prose writer rather than a poet.