…Truth provides a clear example here;
And so the sun consumes both stone and letters.
Yes, earth mourns in dark-brown garments;
but soon she’ll stride to her spring wedding.
How fitting: the destroyer is itself destroyed…
It is both disorienting and hopeful to receive, by mail, this copy of Winter is Past. Since it is the start of an unusually early winter in Vancouver (with record lows for October) this chapbook is out of seasonal time, but it is also out of chronological time. It offers two old poems by the seventeenth century poet, Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg in their original German alongside their very new English translations. Over the past year, three poets from Winnipeg, Joanne Epp, Sally Ito and RML author Sarah Klassen, have been working together to collaboratively translate Greiffenberg’s sonnets for English readers. This hand-printed pamphlet features two short poems from Greiffenberg’s Geistliche Sonnette, Lieder und Gedichte (1662). There is also a full page lino cut image of an eagle in flight, and the cover includes a lino print of a branch of blossoms printed onto light pink textured paper. The signature is hand sewn with a 5-hole binding. In Sarah Klassen’s note that came in the mail with the book, she writes that Joanne Epp made the book as part of a class, History of the Book, at Canadian Mennonite University, where a letterpress was available for the production. More translations of Greiffenberg by Epp, Ito and Klassen are found here.
