The Third Remembrance

The chapbook title The Third Remembrance comes from The Five Remembrances, an ancient Pali text attributed to the Buddha. The third remembrance reminds us that we are of a nature to die, and nothing we can do will prevent our eventual death. My sister used to have an app that sent periodic texts saying things like "Death is inevitable." Rather than being depressing, the text messages made us laugh, and the remembrances help us focus on what's important, finding the sweetness and tenderness in each moment. These poems, dedicated to our parents, move from the loss of the Greatest Generation to aging as a Baby Boomer, to awe at my Gen Alpha Grandson when he tells me he's "Skibidi."Excerpt from Ode to FallingI was always good at falling.When the ligament goes wobbly, the ankle turns along the pathway, Only fools try staying upright.I go limp, not do it halfway.Once I woke to van doors springingopen, spilling me to bouncing, tumblingdown a California freeway."Tuck and roll," a dim voice whispered."When you stop, you could be okay."When I reach that final falling, let me resist the urge to fight it.Let me shed my self completely, gently enter that good nightfall, tumbling deeper into mystery.The poems in The Third Remembrance encourage readers to contemplate of our aging and inevitable death, and to know that we are actually happier for being present with it. The poems are full of tenderness and humor even in the midst of loss, with odes to falling, riffs on reaching for nouns and the possibility of "senior moments that don't end." As the author follows poems of her parents' last years with confronting her own aging body, she explores the reality that she and her fellow baby boomers are now "out here on the edge of the cliff" with "no one in front to take the brunt."

These exquisite poems pulse with beauty 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