Devin Johnston

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."

A new collection from the author of Traveler Not days of anger but days of mild congestion, infants of inconstant sorrow, days of foam in gutters, blossoms and snow mingling where they fall, a spring of cold profusion. If a rolling stone gathers no moss, the poems in Devin Johnston's Mosses and Lichens attend to what accretes over time, as well as to what erodes. They often take place in the middle of life's journey, at the edge of the woods, at the boundary between human community and wild spaces. Following Ovid, they are poems of subtle transformation and transfer. They draw on early blues and rivers, on ironies and uncertainties, guided by enigmatic signals: "an orange blaze that marks no trail." From image to image, they render fleeting experiences with etched precision. As Ange Mlinko has observed of Johnston's work, "Each poem holds in balance a lapidary concision and utter lushness of vowel-work," forming a distinctive music.

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 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.

Johnston's third book of poetry returns ad fontes: to sources in Greek and Latin, secret derivations, wellsprings of feelings and forces of nature. Sonically alert, these poems attend to a world with restless curiosity.

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.