Kirjahaku

The poems in Devin Johnston's "Traveler" cross great distances, from the Red Hills of Kansas to the Rough Bounds of the Scottish Highlands, following weather patterns, bird migrations, and ocean voyages. Less literally, these poems move through translations and protean transformations. Their subjects are often next to nothing in several senses: cloud shadows racing across a valley before dusk, the predawn expectation of a child's birth, or the static-electric charge of clothing fabric. Throughout, Johnston offers vivid glimpses of the phenomenal world.

A collection from one of contemporary American poetry's finest craftsmenThrough birdcalls and ancient songs, rain patter and a child's scribble, the poems in Far-Fetched "sound the empty space / to test how long / how far." They follow the contours of Appalachian hillsides, Missouri river bends, and remote Australian coastlines, tuning language to landscape. They register emotional life with great care; this is a work of fierce and delicate attention to the world. It is also poetry meant to be heard, alert to the pleasures of sound. As August Kleinzahler has observed, "In Devin Johnston's poetry every syllable is alive; the vowels and consonants combine to make a distinctive, lovely, austere music."

The seventh book of poems from Devin Johnston, a poet who can "change the way you breathe" (Maureen N. McLane). Dragons is a collection of sonorous, sensual poems from Devin Johnston, "one of the finest craftsmen of verse we have" (Michael Autrey, Booklist). Attentive to both the physical world and our place in it, his arresting images of nature and human life ring with quiet power. An elegy for a ten-year-old hen; a fourth grader seeing a fox, his "fur waistcoat immaculate"; the sound of neighbors arguing set against the "pallid flames" of the setting sun: together, such scenes form a resonant, restrained meditation on life's journey and "the feeling of time."

The selected poems of Devin Johnston, a poet who can "change the way you breathe" (Maureen N. McLane). Why call this plant a weed? Some flowers evince no difference between giving and taking, all their powers dispersed unseen beyond a stile that your wants might for a little while be mine, and open to the light. Bright Thorn, distilling Devin Johnston's work across a quarter century and seven books, offers an alternative to our frenzied moment through the calm measured feeling and formal intelligence of his verse. Historical, philosophical, closely observational, and rooted evenly in the deep poetic past and the daily rhythms of American life, these poems open the world to imaginative scrutiny. Johnston is a chronicler in a Yeatsian sense, whose eye, cast discerningly over the landscape, is affectionate yet icily clear.

The seventh book of poems from Devin Johnston, a poet who can "change the way you breathe" (Maureen N. McLane). Dragons is a collection of sonorous, sensual poems from Devin Johnston, "one of the finest craftsmen of verse we have" (Michael Autrey, Booklist). Attentive to both the physical world and our place in it, his arresting images of nature and human life ring with quiet power. An elegy for a ten-year-old hen; a fourth grader seeing a fox, his "fur waistcoat immaculate"; the sound of neighbors arguing set against the "pallid flames" of the setting sun: together, such scenes form a resonant, restrained meditation on life's journey and "the feeling of time."

While the poems in this collection assay a very broad range of subjects, all of them demonstrate an awareness of what enormous challenges constitute the turning toward -- or away from -- the many faces of experience.