Tender yet jarring, cerebral yet visceral.
Rich, compelling lyric poetry that bores beneath the decorum of civilization, revealing the elementally human beneath.
Few writers are able to use juxtaposition and irony as frequently and consistently and with still-startling results as Johnson does in this penetrating debut. Like his most obvious, almost overshadowing, influence, James Dickey, Johnson accomplishes this through meticulously rendered detail, a knack for subjecting his characters to psychologically trying situations and an evocative sensuality that usually prefigures loss. Most of his major themes and techniques appear in the opening poem, in which the child narrator describes with disarmingly counterintuitive, yet accurate, metaphors the inexorable rise of floodwaters: “a puddle that grew wide on the kitchen floor then / covered it, absorbing the hall and climbing, / as an old man would, or a toddler, the steps.” Beset by diluvial apocalypse and the ceaseless cacophony of “the yipping, frantic dog,” Mamma frets instead over social obligation: “My god, Gardiner, the violin. We left Phoebe’s violin. / You have to go get it, Gardiner. It’s a rental.” Under such pressures, the father reacts instinctually and violently, “raising the window, / the dog struggling in his hands, squeaking and gnashing at him” before “flinging the dog out”—a shockingly vicious move that nevertheless re-establishes calmness. Most of the remaining poems play on variations of these same themes, whether the context is a pas de deux between a rattlesnake and the startled hunter who decapitates him, then weeps, or the young spectator who can’t bear to watch the eroticized sawing-in-half of the magician’s assistant. Whoever they are—man, woman, child, Shakespearean character or Audubon’s gifted but overlooked assistant—Johnson’s narrators are insightful, quietly desperate, honest and driven by wild appetites. For instance, in an appealing panegyric to cigarettes, one narrator concludes, “I’m no more addicted than a word to its meaning. / Saying you’re addicted makes it sound like / you don’t want one. / But I do. / I want every one. / Every one I can get.” Johnson’s poems always sound as if they’re telling the truths that we can’t usually bring ourselves to admit. Ultimately, it is both high praise and mild criticism to note how strong the Dickey influence is here, for in the best of these poems, Johnson rises to such heights, but his own distinct voice never fully emerges. Even so, this is one debut not to be missed.
Tender yet jarring, cerebral yet visceral.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1936482573
Page Count: 90
Publisher: Antrim House
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Lively verses about love, death, and all that lies in between.
Poems of the body and the spirit, coupled with paintings in vivid color.
Robbins (Love Like This, 2005) returns with a new collection of poems both mystical and plainspoken. Carnal and cerebral free verse meditations, exhortations, and brief narratives on relationships, loss, and transcendence fill these pages. “You will have / no idea if it is / sexual or spiritual” says one speaker about a religious awakening, and indeed, the poet often associates these two concepts. One short poem, “They Danced in the Trees,” exemplifies this: “The woman and the beast / sailed quietly from tree to tree / causing joy juice/ to rain down through / the forest.” Verses such as “After 35 Years” and “They Were Married” take readers through many years of a relationship over several pages, taking fair note of everyday banalities even as they celebrate the deeper forces that run beneath them. There are elegies here and poems of travel (to Japan, to Mexico) and celebration. Robbins intersperses images of his paintings throughout his verse—chaotic shapes combining the fauvist brushwork of French painter Georges Rouault with the summery palette of American artist LeRoy Neiman. Their human or animal figures occupy a world that often resembles a description in one of the poems: “a riot of violent color / in a garden gone wild.” The author has a tendency, here and there, to resort to clichés; one narrator says that Kali’s dance will “burn me to a crisp,” for example, and Robbins writes in the introduction that “Entering the creative process is like diving into a rushing river.” But just as often as readers encounter such careworn phrases, they also confront the author’s unique language: spiders weave their webs “in the armpits of the trees,” or “the cold sub-zero air slapped his face like an old woman.” Readers won’t be able to help but feel the contagious energy of these images and words.
Lively verses about love, death, and all that lies in between.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9963818-0-2
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Art Book Bindery
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A darkly humorous modern take on the fleeting triumph of money, corruption, deceit, and evil.
In this epic poem, Kwakye (The Executioner's Confession, 2015, etc.) recounts the lives of two Ghanaian twins—one good, one evil—from birth to death.
These are no ordinary twins—they don’t share the same parents, and upon his birth, Kobi the Magician, stands up, cuts his umbilical cord, and informs his mother that he’s self-sufficient and needs her only for spiritual support. Three attending midwives prophesy that he’s destined for greatness and try to introduce him to his twin brother, Paa Quartey. Kobi comes from modest circumstances, however, and Paa’s parents are rich. The senior Quarteys throw the midwives out, after which the women become captives in a forest and perish when voices of the sea entice them into drowning. Meanwhile, young Kobi excels in athletics and his studies, even correcting and teaching his grateful teachers, while young Quartey grows up as a spoiled brat whose doting parents think he’s a prodigy but who flops at everything he tries. After becoming a skillful fisherman, Kobi meets his foreordained twin while delivering fish to his mansion. Despite the parents’ misgivings, the twins bond. Kobi helps his increasingly dissolute brother as he launches a political career. The good twin writes earnest speeches for his brother, even though Paa is “a drinking, partying slob” and “a pampered, and arrogant snob” who revels in drunken orgies and “ménages a beaucoup.” Paa kills a woman in a drunken hit-and-run, and the story ends as a mob storms the twins’ hideout. Kwakye’s imaginative tale takes place in Ghana but could just as easily be set in the United States or any country beset by corruption, any place “where the tall / in intellect are mocked and then entrapped within / manacles of the powerful.” Rhyming quatrains move the story along with wit and grace, and despite the tragic outcome, Kwakye’s writing contains exuberant humor, often sexual or scatological, and cutting insights into human nature, especially the hypocrisy and sycophancy of the hangers-on who feed off the powerful with “faked genuflections and wordy words.”
A darkly humorous modern take on the fleeting triumph of money, corruption, deceit, and evil.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9679511-1-9
Page Count: 428
Publisher: Cissus World Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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