Martin Gayford

Martin Kemp

Jane Munro

The Art and Technology of Depiction

Hockney's Eye

When Jane Munro’s husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, the Griffin-award-winning poet must chart a path through the depths of grief, learning to live with loss and to take solace and find freedom in the restorative powers of writing. Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life—two lives—when Jane Munro’s husband, Bob, is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Evoking Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow—the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death, the exhaustion of caretaking, and the regret in seeing life’s scope narrow and diminish. Writing with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it means to care for a husband who is gradually but devastatingly deteriorating while her own identity is eclipsed by a single word—caregiver. Even a doctor admonishes, “What job could be more important than caring for your husband?” In this portrait of the myriad lives contained in a single life, Munro ultimately finds respite in the power of writing, Iyengar yoga and in the rhythms of the moon—not to heal but to face grief without breaking. A poignant evocation for anyone who has experienced loss, Open Every Window reveals the pain and power inherent in loving and being loved. Framed with short observations of the moon—from a New Moon in Pune, India to the following New Moon in Vancouver, Canada—this memoir will entrance with its lyricism and comfort with the writer’s hard-won warmth and wisdom.

A Memoir

Open Every Window

Suzanne Reynolds

Elenor Ling

Touch is our first sense. Through touch we make art, stake a claim to what we own and those we love, express our faith, our belief, our anger. Touch is how we leave our mark and find our place in the world; touch is how we connect.0Drawing on works of art spanning four thousand years and from across the globe, this book explores the fundamental role of touch in human experience, and offers new ways of looking. In a series of lavishly illustrated essays, the authors explore anatomy and skin; the relationship between the brain, hand, and creativity; touch, desire and possession; ideological touch; reverence and iconoclasm. A final section collects a range of reflections, historic and contemporary, on touch.00Objects range from anonymous ancient Egyptian limestone sculpture, to medieval manuscripts and panel paintings, to devotional and spiritual objects from across the world, to love tokens and fede rings. Drawings, paintings, prints and sculpture by Raphael, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Carracci, Hogarth, Turner, Rodin, Degas, and Kollwitz are explored, along with work by contemporary artists Judy Chicago, Frank Auerbach, Richard Long, the Chapman Brothers, and Richard Rawlins.0The events of 2020 have made us newly alive to the preciousness and the dangers of touch, making this exploration of our most fundamental sense particularly timely and resonant.0 0Exhibition: The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK (05.01.-03.05.2021).

The Human Touch

The articulated human figure made of wax or wood has been a common tool in artistic practice since the 16th century. Its mobile limbs enable the artist to study anatomical proportion, fix a pose at will, and perfect the depiction of drapery and clothing. Over the course of the 19th century, the mannequin gradually emerged from the studio to become the artist’s subject, at first humorously, then in more complicated ways, playing on the unnerving psychological presence of a figure that was realistic, yet unreal—lifelike, yet lifeless. Silent Partners locates the artist’s mannequin within the context of an expanding universe of effigies, avatars, dolls, and shop window dummies. Generously illustrated, this book features works by such artists as Poussin, Gainsborough, Degas, Courbet, Cézanne, Kokoschka, Dalí, Man Ray, and others; the astute, perceptive text examines their range of responses to the uncanny and highly suggestive potential of the mannequin.

Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish

Silent Partners

Fitzwilliam Museum

British Landscape Watercolours, 1750-1850

Griffin Award-winner returns with new poems that are spacious with interiority, alive with a hard-earned lightness. Waves carried a glass float--designed to hold up a fishing net--across the Pacific. Beached it safely. Someone's breath is inside it. In Glass Float, her seventh collection, award-winning poet Jane Munro considers the widening of horizons that border and shape our lives, the familiarity and mystery of conscious experience, and the deepening awareness that comes with a dedicated practice such as yoga. This book is about connections: mind and body; self and others; physical and metaphysical; art and nature; west and east, north and south. In "Convexities," the book's opening poem, Munro quotes the grandfather who taught her to paint: "art is suggestion; art is not representation." No concavities, he said. Only the "little hummocks" that her pencil outlined as she did contour drawings. Munro's deft suggestion, her tracing of convexities, conveys underlying complexities, not by explication, but by looking with eyes and heart open to where mysteries almost surface. US bubbles says the baby, looking out the window at snowflakes the old man tears up two characteristics of the human animal-- to speak, to weep both move me are you moved by words--by tears "Like glass floats themselves, these neat, clear poems contain Munro's breath. They cross oceans. Jane Munro's Glass Float--part travelogue, part journal, part meditation--picks up where Blue Sonoma ends: the speaker finds herself alone, at the live edge of her life. ... You are not merely called on to look at yourself but to 'receive your face.' A gift." --Ian Williams, author of Reproduction

Glass Float

Helen Spiby

Evidence based practice is now widely accepted as a fundamental tenet of midwifery. The importance of evidence in defining midwifery policy and practice in the UK health system, and others, is acknowledged and enduring. While the development and evaluation of research in midwifery is well charted, the question of how such evidence is incorporated into practice has, to date, received less attention and discussion in the midwifery profession. Answering this need, Evidence Based Midwifery focuses on the dissemination and use of evidence for midwifery practice, and explores midwives’ experiences in using the evidence base to inform policy and enhance clinical practice. Written by a highly-regarded and diverse group from the UK and international midwifery community, Evidence Based Midwifery addresses issues of relevance to all midwives whether clinical practitioners or educators, students or supervisors, researchers or managers. Issues that influence evidence based midwifery are discussed, and topics covered include problem based learning, implementation of evidence based guidelines and the involvement of service users. Edited by founder members of the Evidence Based Midwifery Network International collaboration with contributions from the UK, Greece, Canada and the Netherlands Primary focus on the incorporation of evidence into midwifery practice Real-life examples throughout

Applications in Context

Evidence Based Midwifery

A wise and embodied collection of dreamscapes, sutras and prayer poems from a writer at her peak In Blue Sonoma, award-winning poet Jane Munro draws on her well-honed talents to address what Eliot called "the gifts reserved for age." A beloved partner's crossing into Alzheimer's is at the heart of this book, and his "battered blue Sonoma" is an evocation of numerous other crossings: between empirical reportage and meditative apprehension, dreaming and wakefulness, Eastern and Western poetic traditions. Rich in both pathos and sharp shards of insight, Munro's wisdom here is deeply embedded, shot through with moments of wit and candour. In the tradition of Taoist poets like Wang Wei and Po-Chu-i, her sixth and best book opens a wide poetic space, and renders difficult conditions with the lightest of touches. Grey wood twisted tight within the framework of the tree Ð impossible to snap off, forged as it dries. And in me, parts I can't imagine myself without Ð silvering. ~from "The live arbutus carries dead branches ... "

Blue Sonoma

When Jane Munro's husband is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, the Griffin-award-winning poet must chart a path through the depths of grief, learning to live with loss and to take solace and find freedom in the restorative powers of writing. Open Every Window is a genre-bending prose account of the unravelling of a life--two lives--when Jane Munro's husband, Bob, is diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Evoking Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, this memoir charts a path through sorrow--the pain of seeing a partner age and approach death, the exhaustion of caretaking, and the regret in seeing life's scope narrow and diminish. Writing with courage and love, Munro grapples with what it means to care for a husband who is gradually but devastatingly deteriorating while her own identity is eclipsed by a single word--caregiver. Even a doctor admonishes, "What job could be more important than caring for your husband?" In this portrait of the myriad lives contained in a single life, Munro ultimately finds respite in the power of writing, Iyengar yoga and in the rhythms of the moon--not to heal but to face grief without breaking. A poignant evocation for anyone who has experienced loss, Open Every Window reveals the pain and power inherent in loving and being loved. Framed with short observations of the moon--from a New Moon in Pune, India to the following New Moon in Vancouver, Canada--this memoir will entrance with its lyricism and comfort with the writer's hard-won warmth and wisdom.

Rarely exhibited and in superb condition, the watercolor collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge is one of the finest in the world. This book contains the gems of that collection--approximately 150, all of them reproduced large and in color, mostly for the first time. The most famous artists of this, the 'Golden Age' of British watercolor art, are all represented (Turner, Cotman, DeWint, Cox, Cozens, Girtin, Palmer, Constable, Ruskin, Sandby, Towne, Varley) together with some less well known, or better known for work in other media--Wilson, Wright of Derby, Romney, Gainsborough, Holland, for example. But the collection is most remarkable for the outstanding quality of the individual paintings, and Jane Munro (Senior Assistant Keeper at the Museum) emphasizes this in a text that closely examines each particular work and locates it in the artist's career.

British Landscape Watercolors, 1750-1850

Jane Munro's poems are explorations of the mysteries of inner experience. What are the truths of emotion? What can the body know? In Grief Notes & Animal Dream, Munro's third collection, we enter the condition Gaston Bachelard has called reverie, strange and miraculous beauty glowing in the suspended underwater light of the heart. "We arrive in the midst of this book as one arrives in mid-life: feet on the ground, eyes closed -- and by example are instructed to walk. Our feet will find the way, says the dream logic of waking thought which is the language of this book; and the motion, the motion of that walking and of these poems, which is syncopated, because events sometimes conspire to pull us up short, nonetheless sets us humming. Who should read this book? Those who look ahead; those who look back; those of us in mid-life who look both ways, eyes closed which is to say open to the stubborn, intimate attachments we live by." --Roo Borson

Jane Munro

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