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CURRENTLY IN BOOKS
Where poetry and art blend

Sarah Klassen

Tasting the Dust
Jean Janzen. Intercourse, Pa.: Good Books, 2000. 69 pp.

The four sections in Jean Janzen’s latest book, Tasting the Dust, are windows that face into the wind’s four directions. Each window opens with a poem responding to a Jan Vermeer (1632-75) painting of a woman caught in some activity in a room of the house. As the Dutch painter’s skill recreates the interaction of light and shadow with the human figure, so Janzen’s poetry invokes both physical and spiritual reality surrounding the pilgrim grappling with the question: “Where is home?”

As usual, Janzen’s poems shimmer with colour, lyricism and passion. There is a sense that all life is one, that we are part of the wind, dust and water that we see beyond our human shelters. It is the light, in particular, that the poet is drawn to. In describing the flight path of monarch butterflies, she echoes the human longing: “To know the wide light, where/it intersects with their own,/so that they turn inland in time/to that unfamiliar home.”

Besides the Vermeer paintings, the poet draws inspiration from a variety of European art: Fra Angelico’s (c. 1400-1455) frescoes with their sacred subjects; Jan Van Eyck’s (1370-1441) Ghent Altarpiece; and the copper plates depicting Mennonite martyrs of the sixteenth century. In “The Language of Light”, the poet is moved by the work of Dutch artists to exclaim: “Now my own feet float/on this watery country where light/cannot be divided from light . . .”

As in her previous four collections, Janzen turns to her own family story for raw material. Near the end of the book, she describes her dying mother: “She is an empty house/No kindling/for the iron-cold stove./No one rattling/the pots in the morning.” This image offers a moving contrast to Vermeer’s live, active women in their various rooms. It also demonstrates the poet’s eloquent artistry, not only in fashioning individual poems, but in shaping the book as a whole.

Sarah Klassen is a writer and poet and a retired English teacher living in Winnipeg, Man. She is a member of River East MB Church.

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Last modified July 16, 2000.

© 2000 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
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