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
Midwest Book 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.
Snake in the Parsonage FROM THE PUBLISHER
Snake in the Parsonage includes the poems for which Jean Janzen received The Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. Selected by a panel of major poets.
Once again Jean Janzen shows us life -- colored deeply and in irrepressible light. She finds both ecstasy and incompleteness -- while waiting, at the piano and in the halls of the old people's home, lying in the field, shrieking in the cellar, standing at the blackboard.
"With some (not necessarily all) good poets, one can open their pages at random, read a line or stanza detached from its context, yet be rewarded by incontestable poetry. Jean Janzen is such a poet." -- Denise Levertov, poet
SYNOPSIS
From the Backcover
Snake in the Parsonage includes the poems for which Jean Janzen received The Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Selected by a panel of major poets.
Once again Jean Janzen shows us life -- colored deeply and in irrepressible light. She finds both ecstasy and incompleteness -- in the cellar, at the piano, and in the halls of the old people's home, with friends in the field and at the blackboard.
"This book is an event of generosity and grace. With lovely, precise images, Jean Janzen gently restores flesh to spirit and renders sensual pleasures so lush that even in the face of death, 'you have to eat.'" -- Julia Kasdorf, poet
"Jean Janzen writes our songs, the ductile desires of growing up, of living in this 'new country,' the United States. As you read these poems, you realize they are prayers 'smoldering in your chest'; if you contemplate them too long, they will lean you low, so low you will be able to
' . . . put your ear
against the belly of the earth, to hear
it rumble, to hear it sigh.'" -- Rudy Wiebe, novelist
"With some (not necessarily all) good poets, one can open their pages at random, read a line or stanza detached from its context, yet be rewarded by incontestable poetry. Jean Janzen is such a poet." -- Denise Levertov, poet
Jean Wiebe Janzen was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, raised in the midwestern United States, and now lives in Fresno, California. She completed her undergraduate studies at Fresno Pacific College and received a master of arts at California State University of Fresno. She has won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and other awards. Her previous books are Words for the Silence (1984), Three Mennonite Poets (1986), and The Upside-Down Tree (1992). She teaches poetry writing at Fresno Pacific College, in the Fresno area public schools, and at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia. Her husband, Louis Janzen, and she have four children and six grandchildren.
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