Jayne Brown is the author of My First Real Tree, a book of poems from Foothills Publications which grew out of her Master of Fine Arts in Poetry degree at San Diego State University. Brown taught writing at San Diego State and community colleges, and at Penn State Berks until retiring in 2018. She was selected as the 8th Poet Laureate of Berks County, Pennsylvania, and continues to garden, write, and live there with her partner of 35 years.
PRAISE:
These exquisite poems pulse with beaty in a world where losing things is a bittersweet reality. In these pages Jayne Brown, a gifted storyteller, weaves threads of vulnerability and tenacity. She evokes the cadence of speech but with the heightened rhythms of music as she confronts death and aging. Here is a collection that brims with keen observation, with humor, with compassion. Through memory, everyday pleasures and meditations on identity, The Third Remembrance reminds us that it is human connection that tethers us to delight. Brown draws us to the cliff-edge of mortality and plunges us “deeper into mystery,” deeper into the exhilarating mystery of being alive.
–Sandra Fees, Author of Wonderwork, BlazeVox Books, 2024.
Jayne Brown‘s new collection lifts the reader into sounds and rhythms of joy even as the poet contemplates the Buddha’s “third remembrance,” a recognition and acceptance of one’s own death. She models for us poetic acts of brave and honest self-examination without a shred of self-pity. Brown begins with the self-reckonings of a tomboy whose play challenges old limits of gender identity. Decades later, “outdated fears” can still haunt a woman who has dared to be herself. In a moving elegy to her mother and a palinode to her father, she leavens acts of honoring with healing. Brown’s wit sharpens when she cocks an eye on the doctor assessing her for major surgery. Examining in another poem how she has saved herself from past falls, she prays to “shed” the self completely at life’s end, “tumbling deeper into mystery.” Readers will pray that the gifted and spirited Jayne Brown keeps on composing her wise word-music. In the extraordinary “Why I Wanted to Play the Cello,” she writes of wanting “one long note”: “All that longing caught between my knees/ to hold with my whole body, and release/ the deep unspeakable.” The poem closes with an unforgettable image of desire and death as forms of continuation:
“My clumsy fingers working the heavy strings/was part of reaching for the hollow place/ where beauty pulses out of emptiness.”
–Heather H. Thomas, author of Vortex Street
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