Carla Funk

Carla Funk is a Canadian poet of Mennonite heritage. who was raised in the central British Columbia community of Vanderhoof. She has taught in the University of Victoria’s Faculty of Arts, and served from 2006 to 2008 as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Victoria, British Columbia. The most-recent of her five poetry collections are Gloryland (2016) and Apologetic (2010) both from Turnstone Press.

She has recently found success as a memoir writer as well with her book Every Little Scrap and Wonder: A Small-Town Childhood (2019, Greystone Press). This will soon be followed by her new memoir Mennonite Valley Girl: A Wayward Coming Of Age, which will appear in September.

In an interview with Ann van Buren for the Katonah Poetry Series, Carla says that the heritage of growing up in an evangelical Mennonite church “was something I tried to shake off for a long time.” Her husband, conversely, when they married was an atheist with no experience of religion. After he became interested in exploring faith, she says, “Somewhere along the way we found that there was mystery in the world and that was part of the pursuit of faith and spirituality.”

Psalm from the Dollhouse

The hearth is cold. The mantle clock, unchiming.
Piano locked and lidded in the den.
Windows shuttered, slack-hinged, bent.
Through grey slats, a fence of splintered pine,
shadows where the ivy greened and climbed
towards the attic bedroom’s unmade bed.
Pitched in corners and under chairs, cobweb
dust, moth husk, old flies. Nothing left alive.
Reach down a hand to set things right in me.
Room by room, sweep through. Make true the crooked door.
Gather up the figure lying facedown on the floor,
and blow the ashes from her eyes. Let her see
the table’s feast. Let her drink. Let her eat
and then walk singing to the star-washed street.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.

Sarah Klassen*

Sarah Klassen is a major Canadian poet whose poems rise reflectively and naturally from her life and fascinations. Her eighth poetry collection The Tree of Life (2020, Turnstone) continues the trajectory of her excellent 2012 collection Monstrance. Carla Funk has said, “Tuned to time―ancient, apocalyptic, and current, these poems sing of pilgrimage…”

Here you’ll find several poems that find Sarah Klassen in her native habitat ― the banks of the Red River in Winnipeg. “Once you’ve lived beside a river,” she says, “you’ll always want to rest your burning eyes / on water.” And so, we’re invited to do so with her as her experiences regularly resurface.
----------“Before sundown on a spring evening,
----------I leaned over the balcony railing. Below me
----------The river slithered north, a grey-green, turgid serpent.”
She’s on the lookout for, “six half-grown foxes…yelping, chasing, / wrestling on the grass like children unrestrained…” (“In Passing”).

Similarly, in “Ritual” she begins, “Holy week and three buffleheads on the cold river / practice the right of baptism.” A few days ago, she mentioned to me by e-mail, “These past few days I've been entertained by a family of playful otters on the river,” so I’m hopeful that they too will make it into a poem sometime soon.

Often, too, the stories and language of scripture appear ― Elijah, Hagar, Esther, Mary, and seven poems for the seven churches of Revelation 2 and 3. Two sections of her reflection on the church in Ephesus, appears at Poems For Ephesians.

Refuge

What song do we sing when the journey ends
and we find ourselves in another country
with our exhausted children, our pitiful possessions,
a wardrobe all wrong for the climate,
a language no one understands? Our names
are known to no one, our gestures inappropriate

in this culture. We are naked. Nervous.
The overwhelming welcome breaks our hearts.
Each smile a shocking surprise.
A minivan opens its obedient doors and we ride
like royalty to light-filled rooms, furnished for us.
We are told: This is your home.

If we knew the language
and had breath to speak it,
we would ask: Where is that river
at whose banks we may fall to our knees
and weep?

Posted with permission of the poet.

*This is the third Kingdom Poets post about Sarah Klassen: first post, second post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. His latest poetry collection is Ampersand (2018, Cascade). His books are available through Amazon, and Wipf & Stock, including the anthologies The Turning Aside, and Adam, Eve, & the Riders of the Apocalypse.