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No one can write an epic these days and be taken seriously, a fact of which the author of this rollicking long poem is hardly unaware. His avowed purpose is "to blow a little hot air" - the element which he and all other epic poets presumably have in abundance - on the "cold ashes" of the Mennonite past (22). Even so, he frankly admits to fears that the resulting treatment of religious politics will not prove interesting to the contemporary reader.

[How to make these machinations more
intriguing than snakes 'n ladders played
on the org. charts of my own country's
bureaucracy, here defies me and my muse.
Perhaps, I can offer some yogurt with locusts
dipped in honey - to pass the time?] (40)

But the poet's actual solution to this problem instead appears to have been to selectively present these machinations as a series of sensational episodes sensationally rendered, the final product bearing remarkably little resemblance to an org. chart.

As you might have guessed by now, no small part of the poem's interest lies in the fictionalized version of Isaac ("Doglass," his low-German speaking grandmother/muse calls him) who serves as narrator. The main action begins at what appears to be the narrator's "termination interview," and for purposes of entering into the spirit of the work, it is necessary to suspend disbelief (along with the question of who is narrating if not the narrator) and entertain the possibility that the termination is literal as well as metaphoric.

Laid out, then, for all the eager
young executives around the table,
is a corpulescent [sic] fast-tracker ... (27)

Enter the muse's husband, grandfather Peter P., who rescues Doglass (or his ghost) from the business world and whisks him away on an extended adventure in time travel, in which the two characters will survey the Mennonite ethos, historical and mythological, from a vantage point "just beneath / the jaw of God" (35). The fictional apparatus for the author's exploration is at this stage complete, and it appears to be one by means of which all things will be possible.

What follows doesn't disappoint. Peter P. guides the narrator on a tour that includes more than a glimpse of several controversial Mennonite and "pre"-Mennonite male figures, each of whom the narrator is identified with in one way or another. These include, first, John Beukels, "Melchiorist-Anabaptist revolutionary Utopian," who is introduced with the image of "a bearded maniac in flowing white / ...playing soccer solitaire with the head / of a young virgin" (39). "I hypothesize that Beukels occupies / the shadowy side of my ancestral tree," states the narrator, "explaining, perhaps, the origins / of what others, who should know better, / claim to detect in me"(47). Next, also from the sixteenth century, comes Menno Simons himself, who, prior to his break with the Roman Catholic Church, kept company with, in his own words, "'vain boasters / and frivolous babblers,'" prompting the narrator to wonder if Simons would care to claim him as yet another disciple, "one who reboots / daily all these qualities'" (50). Question unanswered, the time travellers go on to view scenes from late eighteenth-century Russia, on this occasion actually touching down. Here the narrator ends up copulating with one of his ancestor Mennonite Elder Jakob Hoeppner's "Tartar chicks" (i.e., women) in his guise as a prairie chicken (i.e., bird) which he has assumed as a "dress rehearsal / ...for the plains of Western Canada" (70) - though the narrative never arrives there. Instead, the story continues in Russia, moving ahead a century and, in its final epp-isode (I couldn't resist - since it is entitled "Epp-ic") focuses on the ultimately unsuccessful campaign of Class Epp, Jr.: "Millennialist, visionary, / fulminating madman" (79) and "self-proclaimed / fourth figure of the Godhead" (83). Even Epp "won more followers / than your poetry,"(81) Hoeppner (co-opted as a member of the expedition) taunts the narrator.

Surveying the above summary, I see a certain difficulty in doing the poem justice. Somewhere there's a narrative, certainly, much like the one I've attempted to outline, but it is constantly interrupted not only by references to the narrator's present in the fictional frame but also to a present I would risk taking as belonging to a partly real, partly fictional entity we might think of as "the author." For example, the Epp narrative concludes as follows: "Epp was cast out, died penniless / and alone [as I am now]" (83) and continues, "Nothing but this narrative will survive / me. I , too, have done time in skid-row / domiciles...(84). One senses that the author has focused on the visionaries of the Mennonite past because, as in his fictional voyage as narrator, he identifies with them more than he ultimately does with the faithful followers. Nowhere is this clearer than in his concluding reference to grandfather Peter P., who as recreant farmer and would-be poet, provides the author/narrator with the only direct link to the visionary past:

To me, slightly mad, visionary, manic
depressive - a man I venerate - Peter P.
amongst his peers, was crackpot, outcast,
struggling to find a stairwell [sic] to salvation.
He was an Epp with no followers,
a shepherd with no lambs, a poet
with no audience; an Epp or Menno
whose aspirations exceeded the immediate
world - as do mine and did, within this poem. (89)

Just as there is more to the content of the poem than a single narrative line, there is, as is evident in the above lines, more to its tone than humour. Emotional depth is equally present on occasions where Isaac's coverage moves beyond the colourful figures I've mentioned to include the broader range of Mennonites who, "stripped of arms and legs, / affixed to broken wheels atop spindly poles," (35) endured centuries of persecution for beliefs that Isaac, an "ethnic" Mennonite, considers "quite harmless, really" (33). The most vivid representation of these masses comes in the form of grandmother Martenskya, "seated as she is, if anyone deserves, at the right hand of God" (37).

Finally, considering the work's complexity, it may be difficult to say what exactly Isaac has ended up with - besides a fine piece of art. One wants to compare Isaac's Past, Present: Tense... to Miriam Toews' novel A Complicated Kindness simply in that the two are contemporaneous statements by Canadian authors of Mennonite background, but there, it seems to me, the comparison ends. Where Toews' work has much that is interesting, and scathing, to say about Mennonites and the extremity of their efforts not to inhabit the modern world, Isaac's narrator, a refugee from that world, and its corporations, presents a mythologized view of Mennonite history in the process of which, though he seems to relate well to the "historical" figures, he is paradoxically dwarfed by the common people, "their courage / of convictions, their solidarity / their faith" (89). That this faith may have originated in a vision no more reliable than that of Isaac's visionary narrator doesn't detract from the heroism.