The Enchanted House

Lynn R. Szabo is chair of the English Department at Trinity Western
University, Langley, B.C.

The title poem of Janzen’s first collection foregrounds significant
cues about the parameters and interpretational dynamics of the more than
40 other offerings in the volume. The search for home, with its portents
of knowing and being oneself in the world, is a recurring motif not only
in “The Enchanted House” but also in the dark hauntings and
unrequited hopes of Janzen’s speaker in her continued attempts to
construct shelter and meaning in life and love. Of such often love-lost
spaces, the narrator presciently perceives the elusive quest: “We
couldn’t create anything / in that unromantic house / (all stainless
steel and kitchen white).”

Often rawly excised from the poet’s deepest yearnings, Janzen’s
poems feature an alchemy of lyricism and harshness that produces prayers
to the wind, at one instance, and powerfully acerbic images of deathly
eroticism, at another. At its best, for example, in “Lost Spring,”
her lyricism results in a transcendent luminescence, full of auditory
and visual suspensions and compressions: “so soon the swans’ /
disturbance dies away / becomes this flock of silence—this absence.”
Such enchantment is echoed in “Invitation.” In puzzling contrast,
“Three Women” is somewhat over-narrated and lacks an invitation to
interpretation, with its truncated scenes and assertive exclamations:
“I walk forward / burned clean of history / not knowing three women /
have cleared this fresh road.”

In its four diverse sections, the poems are enhanced by allusions to
Greek mythology, particularly Persephone (the symbol of transformation
with whom the narrator repeatedly identifies), Shakespeare,
Frankenstein, and Georgia O’Keeffe, intermingled with the compendium
of life’s common rites of passage, particularized by their individual
details.

Janzen’s volume, although uneven, evokes the unsparing beauty and
betrayed longings of the search for identity and relation—oneself to
another, oneself to the world. Its portraiture parses life’s meanings,
summarized in “Flock,” one of Janzen’s shortest but most moving
poems to nature: “I’m sorry, sorry to be so happy / in this darkness
that’s flown / into my house. / Is this freedom?”