Canadian Poets

Reading the Canadian poets' poems in A Capella felt a little bit like I was reading the first half of Sleeping Preacher. A lot of the poems felt to me to be written around a focal event, a historical event, a familial event, like Kasdorf's were.

Though I don't read much poetry, it seems to me as though most of the non-Mennonite poetry I've encountered hasn't been so family-focused as the Mennonite poetry we've read this semester. Of course, family and heritage and the earth are hugely important things to Mennonites, but there are many many groups and sects producing poets (aren't there?) and aren't family and heritage important to everyone?

I especially enjoy the poems about nature and the earth, that speak of the rawness of the world around us, and how we are blessed by it. For example, Patrick Friesen's "clearing poems" or David Waltner-Toews' "How the Earth Loves You" with its mix of body and nature imagery. Leonard Neufeldt's poems, like "Dyke View Berry Farm," and "The tree with a hole in our front yard."