A Brief Reflection on Jayne Marek’s Poetry

Jayne’s book Torrential was published posthumously by Cornerstone Press as part of their Portage Poetry Series in April 2025. It’s a wonderful and moving collection.

When I think of Jayne’s poetry, I think of nature, of the Pacific Northwest, of salmon, orcas, streams, and ravines. Many of the poems in her last collection are detailed and delicate, like “Last Crocus,” written from the point of view of a crocus. Others are full of wild, rushing energy, like the title poem, “Torrential.” Jayne also wrote very movingly about human connections and encounters, about friends, and about family, as in “Blue Jacket,” a meditation on her father’s death. In this poem, the speaker recalls her father’s jacket and “all / that went with it,” concluding with

enormous stars, the hush of footfalls
as he walked alone, but for yelps of coyotes
in the distance, their cries a ritual of family
preparing for the night.

It has become something of a commonplace to refer to writers or poets as brave. But in the case of Jayne Marek, I think this is truly a fitting description for her embrace of a vision of life that includes suffering and death alongside beauty and youth. In her life, too, we saw how resilient she was as she maintained her warmth and focus while dealing with illness. Many of the poems in this collection take on added resonance in light of Jayne’s death, as when she writes, in “Ritual for Beasts,” of how the bodies of salmon are returned to the earth,

where I too want to vanish
into ten thousand welcoming touches
of soil. Not afraid to be consumed in my turn.

As Jed describes in his remembrance of her, Jayne had a beautiful way of reading poetry aloud. There are certain poems we’ve published in Bracken that immediately recall for me her gentle, expressive voice. One of her poems in Torrential begins with salmon and then widens its scope to encompass an entire life cycle and the ecosystem around it. We are so fortunate that its original publication in the journal Terrain includes a recording of Jayne reading it:

“If One Can Speak Seriously of the Sublime”

Torrential can be found online at Bookshop.org, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon.

–Kate Deimling

Back to Issue XIII…