Contents
On My Mind...
Materials
for Review |
|
Reviews
| Author |
Johnson, William |
| Title |
Out of the Ruins |
| Publication |
Lewiston, ID: Confluence
Press, 2000 |
| ISBN |
1881090310 |
| Reviewed By |
Leonard Hitchcock
Idaho State University Library |
Editor's Note: William Johnson
is Idaho's State Writer-in Residence and his book, Out of the Ruins,
is the ILA Book of the Year Award for 2000. For more information, see the article.
Quoted selections below are from various poems within the book.
Forty-seven poems, few more than a page
in length, written in free verse. Poems
set in farm-yards, forests, trout-streams, ancient barns.
Quiet, contemplative poems,
Little in them speaks of anger, or bitterness, or lust; there is no
rage, no poet’s alienation from an uncomprehending world, no railing at
society or fate. Instead,
there is a pervasive musing on time’s passage, on the melancholy of
witnessing the coming-to-be and passing-away of familiar things, familiar
people.
These are poems that cherish and
rehearse moments of poignant contact with the world, often by dwelling on
those remnants of man’s material creation that have been weathered by
time and nature’s dumb and relentless erosion.
The abandoned farm, where
|
In a cupboard
mouse-droppings gather, |
|
dark seeds hardening
into the future, |
|
|
|
and cracked wall paper
buckles into |
|
spring with a faded
reckoning of flowers. |
A root cellar, in which
|
The shelves were
makeshift, |
|
sagged rickety
applecrates |
|
|
|
leaning like a
tenement |
|
hoarding their mummied
jars, |
and from the floor rises up a smell, the
|
Must of russets in
burlap |
|
sacks, thin pink
tendrils |
|
sprouting like coiled
antennae. |
A pair of discarded workboots says to the
poet
|
we're coming apart at
the seams. |
|
We cope with
resistance by carrying |
|
our weight, and
endlessly break down |
|
When love is finished,
our tongues shrivel. |
| |
We're fed by shadows,
echoes of dust, of bone. |
These “ruins” are often peopled,
though sometimes only by ghosts. Ruins
of a Chinese settlement on the Salmon river, where coolies
|
...staked
no claim, were killed outright |
|
or hounded
out of camps named after |
|
|
|
whores or
rich ore, Florence, Stibnite. |
|
Now the
wind is a memory of opium |
|
|
|
only the
greasewood dreams, the moon a |
|
silk-screened
lantern... |
Above that root cellar
|
...inches and a world |
| |
away, she stood at the
sink |
| |
scalding chickens or
scouring plates |
| |
humming as she shifted
her |
|
weight. The
oldest child, |
| |
you waited for that
blessing |
| |
of dust, and it came
like |
| |
rain sifted down from
gaps |
| |
in the floor turned
dry... |
Often the poet brings us with him to the
woods, the field, the river. He
asks us to watch the hawk, to share his affection for the moose
|
so huge, so loveably
ugly, |
|
smooching your watery
moss, |
| |
your snout a pendulous
lobe of pry |
|
weighted with great
bone flagons |
and to stand with him, fishing, in the
river, as it laps his ankles and darkness falls, and there is a phantom tug on the line, and
he wonders
|
...what black mouth
waits |
|
as the sky fades into
gray, |
|
lights of a car
flicker through trees |
|
on a road I didn't
know was there |
|
and nothing in the
world has happened. |
Fishing has its mysteries and its small
tragedies, as when he scoops a handful of gravel from a stream bed and
finds a steelhead egg sack among the pebbles.
He tries to replace it in the stream bed, and fails,
| |
Bone-weary, I
wade ashore, set my pole |
| |
On a rock and gaze at
the falling sun. |
| |
From here it's
five-hundred miles to the sea. |
And sometimes, the poet reaches out of
this rural world and touches events far away and disturbing. A Japanese fisherman on the Henry’s Fork remembers
|
..............................the
black rain |
|
|
|
that day the horse
stood melting |
|
to its bones in the
field. |
and looking at the river’s bottom,
sees
|
the boulders glare |
|
like skulls. |
Poetry of regret, of affection for
nature, friends, and family, of nostalgia tempered by honesty, of
celebration tinged with sadness. It
is a portrayal of the West that many Idahoans will find familiar, and
true.
|