By the standards of everyday discourse, feminist, Mennonite poet Di Brandt appears to be a bundle of paradoxes – if not an absolute oxymoron. But the Manitoba writer’s collection of essays, Dancing Naked: Narrative Strategies For Writing Across Centuries, explores her quest to find a language that might contain her seeming contradictions. The book contains mainly essays, but also letters and interviews, written in the decade between the publication of her first book of poems, questions i asked my mother, in 1987 and her latest, Jerusalem, beloved, which won the 1996 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry.

As a whole, the collection endeavours to shape a personal poetics – the how to of Brandt’s art, but more importantly, the wherefore – and offer a prosaic rendering of the topics that absorb her poetry. In “The Poetics of Adolescent Desire” and “Lost Love,” Brandt writes of teenage girls’ obsessive attachment to the conventional romance and more disturbingly of their unwillingness to relinquish the dream even after it fails to materialize. Many of Brandt’s essays discuss the suppression of female eroticism in the same way as much of her poetry celebrates the physical experience of female sexuality.

As best exemplified in her literary excursion into motherhood, “Wild Mother Dancing: Maternal Narratives in Canadian Literature,” Brandt’s essays proclaim the necessity of recovering the stories of mothering, arguing that patriarchy and its texts have so far succeeded in silencing this most crucial of narratives. “Why We Keep On Doing It,” Brandt’s modern day apology for poetry, responds to Michael Ignatieff’s 1995 essay, for Time magazine, entitled “Myth and Malevolence,” which discusses the possible anti-social impact of myths.

In addition to her thought-provoking dialectics, Brandt opens a window into the life of “16th century” Mennonites in a 20th century world. At the same time, her illustration of a community of fellow novelists and poets dismisses notions of a single, uniform Mennonite experience. Brandt invites us into a literary culture graced by acclaimed names such as Sandra Birdsell and Patrick Friesen that deserves increased scholarly attention.

Undoubtedly, some will find Brandt’s literary preoccupations academic or highbrow. But unlike many academics (I think Brandt might define herself as one) she aims to communicate, not obscure. Her decidely feminine, excited, often ebullient voice reinvigorates a number of fading discussions. And while a backlash against feminist political thought has caused many of us to wonder if the old stories weren’t in fact true, Brandt exultingly convinces readers that there are new tales to be told.