current reading, pt. 2

I've just received a copy of Torch Lake & Other Poems (published by Del Sol Press), the first book of poems by Brian Johnson—a book I've been waiting to read for some time now, ever since asking Johnson to send some poems to an issue of a literary magazine I was editing c. 2000, and since reading his chapbook Self-Portrait (on Quale Press).

The poems in Torch Lake are set mostly in prose (Johnson was an editor of The Prose Poem: An International Journal—the magazine that helped, probably more than any other, to feed the 1990s prose poem craze still going strong). The poems range from miniature narratives (some of them in the neighborhood of Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End) to more fractured, paratactic fragments or propositions, sometimes stitched together by commas or em dashes. Johnson's poems often possess a wry, understated, simultaneously observant and introspective quality:

...the house, I made a doorway for the house, you came in the house and lay in the sun, these days, yourself, themselves, these days of yours, lying in the sun at three, you and the sun, the light that, of which, I know, an object to complete you, when I see you, half-dressed, in the sun at three, unconscious of myself, those days being pushed from the house...

                (from "doorway for the house")

Or:

Size, I mean a thing like Chicago's politics or Churchill's appetites, is a rare quantity. I have a big nose, which Freud thought a sign of sexual well-being, and big ears, which the Japanese attribute to wise men. But I am really a little man, anxious, and easily disturbed. I may publish little poems in little magazines, hoping to build stature, but I know my days of inferiority cannot be numbered.

                (from "Sizing")

Or:

Sadly, and so like a man, jumping from one square to the next, I can see you, but I can't express it. An awful lot of young partridges and young doves will say it.

                (from "The Fig-Trees of Italy")

Except for a very few poems that could be read as either verse or prose (a series of single-sentence paragraphs, none of which attains the right hand margin), the only verse in this book occurs in the long, central sequence "'He Lived in Exile for Many Years...'"—a series which, based on my initial read, connects the interrelated themes of travel, storytelling/mythologizing, and self-examination (especially in terms of self-presentation) that exist throughout the first and third sections bookending this one. As always in Johnson's work, I find much to enjoy and to admire here, particularly in the quiet-but-insistent voice speaking throughout these pages.