Customer Reviews

Babel's Stair

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Janzen is a sneakily traditional poet, using time-tested forms that most modern poets are either unfamiliar with or, more likely, are unwilling to submit themselves to the discipline required to master them. Janzen has mastered them and has done so good a job of it that most readers won't know the forms/traditions are there in the first place, though the readers will reap in pleasure the rewards of her skill. She's not really a confessional poet -- thank God, even the Mennonite God -- but when she does confess (or pretend to) she's too hard on herself. For one thing, the photograph on the back of Babel's Stair reveals that she's holding firm well into her forties.
JHBowden

Enthusiastically recommended reading, "Babel's Stair" succinctly showcases the verse of Rhoda Janzen, with each of her carefully crafted poems telling a little story that is hallmarked by the lyrical precision that only a master poet can successfully construct. 'How We Unlove Our Heroes': Consider how we unlove our heroes./We fall in love with Wagner. And then dense/as Nietzsche, we wait gloved in an immense/drawing room, concentrating on our prose./Naturally faith flourishes like fiction./One of Cosima's chickens rustles in,/dressed absurdly in a crinoline,/twittering to set the cracked addiction./Clucks breezy as a hostess dropping hints./You know how you try not to read ahead,/but how the last word is already read?/It's like the dawn, all vicious innocence-/and implicated by the very word/that crashes like a high-toned Wagner chord.