WHEN WE BECAME PLANTS — 2020
Available from Jane Covernton

April 29 That Was the Year

That was the year
humans became plants,
staying in one place,
faces turned towards the sun,
communicating through roots,
sending messages in pollen
carried by bees

“On April 1, 2020, poet Jane Covernton began writing a poem a day for Poetry Month and taking photos to illustrate them as she “walked around alone in the world.” Those poems and the photos of her Roberts Creek world are now the delightful content of her latest book, When We Became Plants: Pandemic Poems. It’s a slight book, only 48 pages long, but it is crammed full of poems she describes as “rough cut, but full of love.” They range from the simplicity of haiku to page-length prose poems that subtly capture the difficulties of the life re-balancing so many of us are engaged in as the pandemic continues on and on.

But she has a stealthy sense of humour, too, demonstrated in poems like “Doggerel in the Time of Plague” that explores life without haircuts and in “Science” where scientists are honking like geese to guide each other in their search for the cure. And she is just plain stealthy in “5:35 Here on Earth” where it takes the reader a moment to realize she has given us a 2020 version of the Lord’s Prayer.

But the crowning pleasure of this book are the photos, some photoshopped but all gloriously clear in the bright Sunshine Coast air, close-ups of flowers and rose hips and fern fronds, distance shots of forest trails and people that belie the pandemic that surrounds us. These photos are almost worth the price of the book in themselves.”
— Betty Keller The Coast Reporter

WHERESOEVER YOU TURN — 2014
Available from Jane Covernton

The yard is a bowl of moonlight again,
trees and distant sea noisy with wind,
again,
my heart heavy with sorrow,
again.
It’s all clichés, this repetition:
a bowl of moonlight,
the trees and sea noisy with wind,
my heart heavy, again.

Why does it keep repeating,
this beauty, this sorrow,
this sleeplessness?
The moon, the trees, the distant sea?
Are hearts really heavy?
Or is that something we say?
Oh yes. Heavy.

Oh give up the why, Jane,
that tiresome cliché question.
Give up, Love.
Just give up, just Be
light-hearted again
in moonlight, in wind, in distant sea,
a meal for the Beloved.

a body of poems. — 2007 Available at lulu.com