In Impermanence, Janet Vickers explores the roots of a profound energy driving the universe: why things change, grow old, die, and then life seems to flourish again. Heraclitus said that you cannot set foot in the same river twice. The river, like the passage of time, is in constant flux and change, never stopping, always flowing. Nothing remains the same, nothing remains still, all passes away in the flow of time and all is impermanent in a constant state of transformation. Life itself seems fleeting and transient, as each moment sifts through our hands like sand on an endless beach. It is the impermanence of existence that transforms all that is and all that will ever be: without death there is no birth, without the seed there is no flower. Those being born are already dying, as Bob Dylan said. Seed becomes the flower, the cradle becomes the grave and all is charged with the electricity of temporality, all is changed from moment to moment. In her first book of poems, Impermanence, Janet Vickers has captured these ephemeral moments in tranquility and grace, driven by a succinct and powerful spark that ignites all existence.

“Where are the measures of impermanance?” asks Janet Vickers in this extraordinary volume of poetry. In Vickers’s world, even the self is a bubble that must constantly be renamed. Her poetry, however, measures impermanence against abiding things: the joys of nature, the struggle against power external and internal, unconditional love. A potent and magical book that swings deftly between tears and laughter.
~ Robert Martens

Janet Vickers’s poems have appeared in various Canadian and UK anthologies such as Down in the Valley (Ekstasis, edited by Trevor Carolan, 2004), literary journals such as The Antigonish Review, Grain and Sub-Terrain, and online in nthposition. You Were There is the title of her first chapbook published in 2006. Her second chapbook Arcana was published in 2008. Janet is currently BC/Yukon Rep. for the League of Canadian Poets, and lives on Gabriola Island with her husband Tony.