Devin Johnston

Devin Johnston's Mosses and Lichens: Poems is straightforward, mainly nature-centric poetry but just isn't my thing. I did, however, enjoy many of the poems in this book because I am a bit of a nature-geek myself. This was one of four random poetry books I pulled down from the poetry shelf at our local library.

I like poems that challenge me to think about what I am reading or, at least, make me want to learn something new. There were more of the latter than the former in this book. Of those, there are three poems based on the works of the classical Greek poet, Ovid; Actaeon, High Water, and The Fall of Icarus. My knowledge of classical Greek and Roman literature and poetry is minimal at best. This is probably something I should rectify because there are a lot of allusions to it both in poetry and fiction.

Of the three poems noted I really enjoyed Actaeon which is both the title and the main character of the poem. Actaeon is a hero in Greek mythology who, while hunting with his dogs, stumbles upon Artemis (Diana), naked, bathing in the forest. In her anger at being seen, she turns him into a deer, who is in turn hunted and eventually killed by his fellow hunters and his own dogs.

Here are some lines....

With no more words, she summoned forth
from the damp patches on his head
the beams and branching tines of antlers,
and stretched his neck and pricked his ears.
She turned his hands to cloven hooves
and upper arms to slender thighs,
enveloping his body in a hide of dappled fur.
She sent a sudden surge of fear
through his veins: he leapt and fled,
wondering at his own speed
until he glimpsed his antlered head
reflected in a little stream.

Later at the end of the poem, he hears his hunt-mates calling for him, wondering where he could be as he was missing out on the deer they were chasing....which, of course, is Artemis.

Of course, he'd rather have missed out,
and he would rather have seen than felt
the dreadful things his dogs had done.
From everywhere they circled round,
their muzzles buried in his flesh,
and tore apart their master,
whatever trace of him endured
beneath the semblance of a deer.

I found myself hunting down Greek gods and heroes and looking up more information on Ovid and put the book, Metamorphoses, on my to-read list. Perhaps, even if though this was not one of my favorite books of poetry, it will spur me to gain a better depth in classical Greek literature.… (mehr)

In Traveler, Devin Johnston shows a range of formal ability including traditionally rhymed verse combined with an eye for nature and an ear for the right sound.

He sees the world in its natural and human history upwelling in geological and meteorological forces:

"In winter, clouds haul water from its source, the ocean basin, welling up by force of deep convection through the troposphere"

His range includes the imagistic and evocative, the intentionally archaic, and the sensual:

"Zipping your skirt, you rustle past, sand hissing through a glass, with the bedouin snap and flash of static-electric sparks disturbing fabric. This morning’s charge could rouse The Desert Fathers of Sinai over which I drowse."

I recommend spending a few days with this short volume.… (mehr)

This was a lovely and thoughtful little book, something between essays and poetry, with both ancient and modern poems sprinkled throughout, etymological musings, and an intimate look at our backyard nature. The essays about dogs, crows, starlings, fairies, squirrels, sycamores, mice, and owls are beautiful, erudite observations and meditations on those rather commonplace creatures: "largely made up of digressions, departures from a life spent too much indoors. This is a book to read with wonder, and I can think of no better way to describe it than to share some excerpts:

From Crows in Winter:
"Bare in winter, a raggedy stand of trees -- alders, walnut, and sumac -- backs up to the highway. Every brarnch holds a dozen crows, oddly fluttering like dead leaves. They number in the hundreds, with more arriving from the west as the sun falls. Yet the birds are surprisingly quiet: their wings softly creak as they settle down for the night, with occasional caws from the younger males jockeying for a branch. In the midst of the colony, I can hear the dry snap of an icicle.
Within the city, so many birds react to human shadows with mild, directionless anxiety: sparrows agitating a bush, starlings darting between telephone wires. Yet these crows maintain a steely alertness at my presence. With neither a cat's sleepy perturbation nor a dog's frenzy, crows are close but unfamiliar. They know more of us then we of them.
...
Metaphors lie in wait, the world's hidden scaffolding; yet the living bird adapts and evades fixed association. Now ominous, now jolly, it alights in the vicinity of meaning and moves on. As documented in Laura C. Martin's The Folklore of Birds, counting rhymes enumerate what crows might augur:
One for sorrow, two for mirth,
Three for a wedding, four for a birth,
Five for silver, six for gold,
Seven for a secret not to be told.
Eight for heaven, nine for hell,
And ten for the devil's own sel'

So mysterious have we found their comings and goings, close at hand yet as remote as stars, black marks in the book of our own fate."

From Sycamores and Sleep:
"Massive brick homes line the avenues around Tower Grove Park. We who live here can feel dwarfed by our own structures, misplaced among these monuments to arid passions. In Walden, Thoreau warns us, "Better not keep a house. Say, some hollow tree; and then for morning calls and dinner parties!" In his journal from 1840, he declares whimsically, "My neighbor inhabits a hollow sycamore, and I a beech tree." Thoreau kept alive the childhood dream of living in trees, finding a lair or nest in nature that would allow him to live without alienation or excess.
Nor was he alone in this fantasy. Gilpin describes a plane tree that stood in Lycea during the reign of Caesars: "From a vast stem it divided into several huge boughs... Its branches still flourished, while its trunk decayed. This in process of time mouldered into an immense cave, at least eighty feet in circumference, around the sides of which were places seats of pumice stone; cushioned softly with moss." The governor Licinuius Mutianus feasted with eighteen of his men in this hollow... In "The Hollow Tree," John Clare recalls a pollard "wasted to a shell/Whose vigorous head still grew and flourished well/Where ten might sit upon the battered floor/And still look round discovering room for more." In such accounts, the trunk expands to a primitive feast hall while at the same time offering a snug retreat or nest. It is at once inside and outside, intimate and immense.
...
My two year-old daughter frequently opens the children's book [I am a Bunny] to its last page, where Nicholas sleeps through the winter in his hollow tree. In Richard Scarry's illustration, the rabbit lies on a pallet of soft straw, tucked beneath the blue blanket; his yellow shirt and red overalls hang on the tree wall. Outside, the snow falls steadily through a gray sky, weighing down the branches of a fir in the distance. It's an image of living alone without loneliness, finding a warm home in the heart of the wide outdoors."… (mehr)