Melodies in the key of O

Piano in the Vineyard Jean Janzen. Good Books, 2004. 74 pages.

Over the years, Jean Wiebe Janzen has served the Mennonite Brethren community (and many others too, of course) with hymn texts, board work, articles, teaching and speaking. But above all, she has served us with poems.

This latest collection, following previous collections Words for the Silence (1984), Three Mennonite Poets (1896), The Upside-Down Tree (1992), Snake in the Parsonage (1995) and Tasting the Dust (2000), as well as poems in many anthologies, is vintage Janzen. The poems are spare yet so wonderfully laden with meaning and matter for the senses. She sees and speaks of her parents and grandparents, memories, the fate of relatives in Siberia, paintings, people she encounters, the natural world. “Naming It: A Garden Cycle” has a poem for each of the 12 months. (August, for example, in which “We sip and we swallow, / seal each day like a jar for the cellar.”)

A sense of sadness, even grief, pervades the collection, because of death (as a childhood friend oils his gun, in the suicide of her grandmother, at Hiroshima, in the deaths of her father and a neighbour). Music weaves through it too – pianos, violins, voices, “the melody / in the key of O, of wonder / and sorrow.”

Janzen was born in Saskatchewan, grew up in midwestern U.S. and now lives in Fresno, Cal. She was a winner of The Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In an article in Direction (Fall, 1998), “Why We Are Afraid of Art,” Janzen spoke of her experience as a poet “as testimony” to recovering “a true sense of awe.” She spoke of art’s power to “reveal truth about God, our time, and ourselves,” and its “potential to change us.”

The poems in Piano in the Vineyard do all that. I recommend them highly, for their beauty and for the chance of personal transformation.

Dora Dueck is associate editor of the MB Herald.