Book Review: "New & Selected Poems" by Sarah Klassen
Reviewed by Melanie East
New & Selected Poems by Sarah Klassen, edited by Nathan Dueck (CMU Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Melanie East
In her exploration of family roots and the refugee-immigrant experience, Mennonite-Canadian poet Connie Braun observes that “it is in the nature of a question to grow, not to make small. Answers are a different matter. If this is so, questions are the crux of faith. And faith is expansive enough to hold doubt.”1
If it is in the nature of a question to expand and hold doubt, then poetry offers us linguistic space for this growth. Poems rarely provide answers: they simply develop an idea. Poems dilate our doubts, give breath to our questions, and yet leave us with the comfort that the question has at least been explored. Braun helpfully reminds us that holding space for questions is an act of faith: if so, then writing poetry is a similarly faith-filled act.
It is appropriate, then, that in Sarah Klassen’s latest collection, the first poem, “Rise and Go,” recalls Abram wondering who he is and where he is going while continuing to walk forward in faith. This opening poem is followed by a full collection exploring the loud silences of family trauma, unspeakable acts of violence ripped from headlines, the questions raised by mute paintings, and thin, quiet moments of hope in biblical and familial characters. Klassen’s poems give voice to—and expand on—our silent doubts and questions.
Born in Winnipeg to Russian-Mennonite immigrants, Klassen has spent decades garnering praise and awards in Canada for her powerful reflections. Now, she reshapes our vision of the world through years of faithful imagination in this latest collection, New & Selected Poems.
Editor of the collection, Nathan Dueck, has shaped this latest volume through an insightful arrangement that invites Klassen’s readers—both seasoned and new—into her lifetime of work. For readers coming to Klassen for the first time, Dueck helpfully groups Klassen’s older poems into nine thematic sections with a final tenth section of new poems. The final section reveals Klassen’s continued strength as a poet who is adept at superimposing the sacred on the secular.
The first nine sections are each named for one poem that in some way highlights the theme of the grouping. As a new reader of Klassen’s work, I found some of the material heart-wrenching and familiar. Similar to many Canadian readers, I share Klassen’s broken but powerful connection to war-torn Europe via the grandparents who fled tragedy. Like Klassen, many of us have ancestors who fled to Canada, carrying trauma with them as they fought the stubborn fields of frozen prairie winters. Klassen’s poetry is often steeped in prairie landscape and family history, giving shape to the particular experiences of her Russian-Mennonite ancestors who left behind the “scent of apricot blossoms” (“Collector”) and arrived in an earthly Promised Land “that wraps itself like glue around your Russian / boots” and never quite lives up to its promise (“A brief history of Edison Avenue”). Readers of Canadian poetry will be accustomed to themes of loss and homesickness, perhaps now more than ever. Indeed, Klassen’s poems are both explicit about her particular ancestral trauma and just as aware of the universality of such experiences in Canada where “immigrant women craving columbine, / anemone, delicate coral bells” are set against a “snarling” pick-up driver in the poem “On guard.”
The familiarity of these motifs, though, belies the fact that Klassen’s collection is strikingly original and complex. The eponymous poem in the first section, “Rewinding Time,” offers an elegiac meditation on the death of the poet’s father, contextualizing his life in both the events of a closing century and the lives of his ancestors. What makes this poem so remarkable is the intertext it leans on to reconcile the passing of a parent. Klassen’s poet-speaker turns to Thomas Hardy’s late-Victorian poem, “The Darkling Thrush,” which is a work marked by Hardy’s recognizable irony. Klassen uses Hardy’s elegy for the “death” of the nineteenth century to probe the nature of hope, reusing lines from his poem and linking her father’s music to that of the thin song of Hardy’s thrush. Yet unlike the speaker of Hardy’s verse, whose macabre vision can only see a sky lacerated by the bine stems that shape his view, Klassen’s speaker is not “unaware” of the hope once found in the frail song of her father’s harmonica.
Stumbling upon Hardy early in Klassen’s collection was a gorgeous surprise: not only because Hardy’s work has been my lifetime companion, but because the intertext prepares readers for several of the poems that engage with a varied collection of artists. The third section, Artist and Medium, opens with a lengthy contemplation of Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem and the complexity of scriptural blessing. Subsequent poems like “What the boat carries” and “Fiction” explore the questions raised by mysterious paintings and highlight Klassen’s comfort with uncertainty. Central to this section, the eponymous poem “Artist and Medium” turns to seventeenth-century Mennonite poet and engraver, Jan Luyken. With more certainty, Klassen’s speaker meditates on Luyken’s copper etchings for the devotional classic, Martyrs Mirror. The speaker here considers Luyken’s choice of etching over poetry to express the “triumphant dying” of the martyr: “Jan chooses a needle and begins / dribbling acid on a copper plate . . . He tries defining / faith.” Klassen’s poet, who also tries “defining faith” in many poems centred on family members or biblical figures, would recognize the struggle to capture the near unthinkable action of choosing a violent death in the name of faith.
Klassen’s imaginative engagement with artists of other media is arguably central to her poetic ethos. If, as Connie Braun suggests, “the nature of a question is to grow,” then Klassen seems aware that it is in the nature of her own poetry to ponder the same questions other artists have pondered—expanding on and dilating their wondering. The tenth and final section of the volume turns to her new poems, and the second of these new poems may well exceed her previous ekphrastic engagements by its surprising juxtaposition.
In “Dawn: A Triptych,” Klassen creates a poetic altarpiece by bringing together three artworks illustrating scenes from the life of Christ. The combination startles: two frescoes from the Scrovegni Chapel by fourteenth-century painter Giotto di Bondone flank the disruptive centrepiece, Golgotha, by Expressionist Edvard Munch.
In the first poem based on Giotto’s Nativity, the poet wonders with the painter what Joseph might be worrying about in the bottom left of the frame. Commas, colons, and periods punctuate the lines of the poem, the caesurae imaginatively mirroring Joseph’s hesitancy in the listing of possible fears for the new baby.
Then, in the turn to Munch’s Golgotha for the middle “panel” of the triptych, the poet describes Munch’s Christ “as if suspended from a stretched out cloud / that is the hand of God.” The first part uses layered sibilant sounds that hint at the hiss of evil that has placed Christ there; yet the “cloud” at the end of the line runs over into the next, bringing together “cloud” and “God” in an imperfect rhyme. For the poet, Munch’s cloud implies that God is hidden but near. In the end, the speaker sees the cloud as the painter’s symbol of possible hope: “As if he believes, or wants us to: / soon the day will dawn.”
In the final third of the triptych, Klassen’s speaker returns to Giotto’s Resurrection and hovers over Mary Magdalene’s confusion when Jesus famously refuses her touch in John 20:17: but there is less uncertainty here. Giotto’s painting captures the moment just before Christ vanishes and everyone else awakens; Klassen’s poet imagines the moment just after—one full of movement where “guards will wake and run their eyes. / The angels will unfold their wings and fly” and Mary will “rise and run” to share the news of the resurrection. To finish her altarpiece, the poet reminds readers that good news is always about to break loose.
Arguably, “Dawn: A Triptych” and the other ekphrastic poems show Klassen at her most faithful as an artist, engaging not only with other media but with the vocation of the artist as co-creator. Painter and writer Makoto Fujimura writes of the artist’s sacred role in caring for culture: “Proper stewardship,” he reminds us, “is part of our poetic responsibility to creation.”2 As a poet-steward, Klassen often attends quite literally to the connection between generative, creative work and the created order. In her poem “Genesis,” for instance, Klassen contrasts three gardeners: her mother, a friend, and a poetic persona. In the cold of March, her mother planted vegetable seeds and tended to her prairie garden—seeds that brought both nourishment and hope. By contrast, her friend settles further into the couch in March, “lost in glossy / Homes and Gardens, stuck between seductive pages,” and dreams of “plump tulips.” Lastly, Klassen’s poetic persona daydreams somewhere between the generative, hope-filled planting of her mother and the aesthetic consumerist desires of the magazine gardener. In her musings on the coming spring, the poet dreams of both the “apple shining on a pristine tree” and the “the serpent coil[ing]” nearby. In her poem named for creation, Klassen reminds us of the hope inspired by a generative calling and the shadow of empty aestheticism that tempts both gardener and artist alike.
In her ekphrastic poems, gardening poems, and some “still life” poems, Klassen is a poet for all artists. She shapes and creates using her own medium of language, but seems constantly aware that she is participating in the work of all artists made in the imago dei. In her poem “The potter,” Klassen imagines a group visiting a pottery studio and watching the artist shape her material: “we cluster / like commas around the woman at the wheel. / Her foot moves up and down. Hands cup the clay, / centring, altering, coaxing it upward . . . The matter in the potter’s hand / gain’s shape.” Readers of Klassen’s poem cluster likewise around the poet who shapes, through punctuation and steady hand, the raw material of the world into a work of art. Like the potter of her poem, Klassen creates with confidence and tentativeness, remaining open to rearranging and reshaping her clay as she receives fresh vision.
A fresh vision appears, appropriately, in the final poem “Aubade”—a hymn to the morning. No elegy or evensong marks the conclusion of this new collection of poems. Rather, the collection ends on a note of hope and promise for a faith-filled poetic vocation: “My wayward compass is recalibrated: / the needle comes to rest at its magnetic north.” As she surveys the minutiae of her morning, the speaker shows us that sacred direction can be found in the poetic details of the everyday. Through Klassen’s collection of poems old and new, personal, occasional, ekphrastic, elegiac but always devotional, readers, too, find their vision recalibrated to its “magnetic north.”
Melanie East has a bio that will appear here.
Sarah Klassen was born in Manitoba in 1932. A Winnipeg English teacher for many years, she also taught in Lithuania and Ukraine. Her poetry has received two National Magazine Poetry Awards, one silver, one gold. In 2017 Sarah Klassen was shortlisted for the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, and she has won a Word Guild Award, a Canadian Authors Association prize, and a High Plains book award. Her published work includes eight poetry collections and four books of fiction. Nathan Dueck is the author of three collections of poetry, king's(mère) (2003), he'll (2014), and A Very Special Episode (2019). Raised in Manitoba, he did his BA and MA in English at the University of Manitoba, and in 2009 received his doctorate from the University of Calgary. He teaches English and Creative Writing at College of the Rockies in British Columbia. His next book is the creative memoir 1979-, to be published in fall 2024.
Braun, Connie T. Silentium. Resource Publications, 2017. p. 121.
Fujimura, Makoto. Art and Faith. Yale UP, 2020. p. 11.