[reviews]
[masthead]
Jonathan Johnson, Mastodon, 80% Complete
(Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2001)
reviewed by Erin Jewell
Jonathan Johnson's first book is a beautiful book of
poetry. It is a very thin book of poetry, but when you finish it you will
not feel let down or as if anything has been held back. At only 76 pages
long you may pick it up expecting it to be a quick read, but Johnson's
poems are so incredibly saturated with images and density that it's anything
but. In order to truly appreciate Johnson's genius you must read his poetry
slowly, soaking up every word, every image, every emotion.
Johnson's work is deeply ingrained in nature,
but not in the Robert Frost way. His appreciation of nature must originate
in his home state of Michigan. He was born and raised in upper Michigan
and the place has left its impression on him, appearing in his writing
from time to time. He now teaches at Eastern Washington University but
his appreciation for nature is evident in his house which is the epitome
of rural with no electricity or running water. In addition to teaching
at Eastern Washington he's also been a rock climbing instructor, carpenter
and backpacking guide.
Because of his different interactions with
his world, Johnson's nature is a modern nature, which possibly makes the
poetry even more real and in tune with the natural world because it lacks
idealism. It is a realistic view of nature, construction in the woods
and the transition from woods to town and back to the woods. You see this
perfectly in his poem "In Green" "I'd burn every page to
paint this sky, / pink clouds fingered over green, that chrome green /
of not yet dusk, silhouette of century-/ old Ponderosa, the needle clustered
end / of each high limb, neon red open, Arby's / Motel 6, Texaco
lit forty feet / above 1-90." (40). This is the epitome of Johnson
I believe, the way he creates this world of beauty, such elegance in the
painted sky juxtaposed with the bleary lights beyond the off-ramp of a
highway.
I appreciate this aspect of the book. It
seems to be mixing the worlds of Frost with his clear love of nature and
the world of Whitman with his astute observation of the manmade world
that gets mixed in with the forest and the lakes in a way that Johnson
makes feel very natural as in his poem "Prime Realty" about
buildings going up in the woods, "Here we build fiction from stars
/ off the end of the dock, a belt of dark shore / between constellation
and reflection. The fire / falls in on itself like a drunk into his bed.
/ Air riffles my tent, wind over nylon woven tight / and singular as sleep,
landscape without names / In the morning workers return to lay block /
for the latest lakefront house, their generator / grunts to life a half-mile
down shore from my camp," (48). He is creating a common ground between
urban and rural and perhaps in writing about it making peace with the
world we live in with its not-quite-spoiled-but-no-longer-pristine-nature
and the stark-yet-beautiful-just-off-the-highway world of more rural settings.
Nearly anyone will like this book. The
subject matter certainly does not exclude anyone in that his poems concern
in general the world that surrounds us. But his work is very dense and
because of this he may be a poet's poet. To really appreciate it, a reader
has to be willing to put in the time and sift through the myriad images
and ideas we are presented with. His stanzas tend to be very short, mostly
two lines, or nonexistent, the poem just a block of text. The look of
thickness in these one stanza poems is just as hard to sift through as
the thick imagery, in that you don't get a stanza break to stop and catch
your break. In this way Johnson's poetry is very intense. In his shorter
stanza poems there is a lot of space in the poem and in the same way the
ideas of the poem can be very spaced out. It is challenging poetry, but
in the end it is worth all of the work you have to put into reading it.
___
Erin Jewell is a writing major at GVSU.
FEATURED:
An Interview with Peter Ho Davies