From Booklist
Janzen takes her family's life as she knows it as the matter of her verse. Fortunately, her family's life is more interesting than most, and she presents it with plenty of its mysteries contemplated but not made into the neat exemplar you might expect of a Christian poet. Daughter of a Ukrainian-born Mennonite pastor from the flat center of North America, she shares that sect's strong feeling for human community, for music, and for the beauty of creation. She begins this collection, set in four parts that loosely follow her passage from childhood to her own motherhood, with a poem on the divine fire within each person. That fire flares continually in poems that, although troubled by war and the separation of loved ones, are predominantly measured songs of praise, which conclude in a resolution, inspired by the music she "hears" in a painting, "Blue Piano," that for the rest of life, "I will gallop into / the dark, / horseshoes flashing." Ray Olson
Review
Janzen's book of poetry provides a fine collection of strong images blended with free verse ("You came like a dusty miller/into my mother's spotless kitchen/and with your soft wings/circled the light of me. ") Enjoy a literary and varied collection exceptionally strong in imagery. -- Midwest Book Review
