|
|
|  | | Contingencies
"Crawl into life. Fall out of life. / Pick it up. Keep on walking,” writes Allan Johnston in a poem at the center of his urgent, eloquent new chapbook. The forward motion he advises propels his own language onward through meditations on such disparate topics as smoking and Caravaggio, ice and a road crew as he cadences the contingencies of his title with warmth and wit.
—Sandra Gilbert, recipient of the John Ciardi Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry, author of nine poetry collections, including Kissing the Bread. Ghost Volcano, and Aftermath, and co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic
Reading Allan Johnston’s new book of poems, Contingencies, is like navigating the world. His poems are like unfamiliar pathways to a deeply familiar place. He’s a poet of outer nature, of plants and ice and birds, but also of our inner nature and textures that shape the webs of our dreams. His poetry is both a comfort and a barb—his phrasings paint with a thick poetic satisfaction, and yet they also spur the poet and reader to always look closer at what is always and ever pulling away. Ultimately, Johnston’s book explains our inexplicable lives—his poems themselves are both the greenness and s | |  | | Departures
These poems recall my life in the 1950s and 1960s in Southern California.
"Johnston's intimate knowledge of Pacific Coast L. A. suburb lifeways comes alive anew in an old language—dry and elegant literary English—even as the ever-present ocean washes over it all. 'We children' troop through the bedrooms and classrooms of the past. These poems chart how we left that (personal) past behind. A strange and moving gathering of poems."
--Gary Snyder | |  | | In a Window
Poetry Collection
| |  | | Northport
These poems reflect my experiences living in Eastern Washington State in the 1970s
Self-discovery and loss—these are the touchstones of Allan Johnston’s fine new collection that recalls the countercultural “back to the land” movement of the 1970s. In Northport, the poet guides the reader through the wonder and waste of the past, and to travel with him is to suffer with him; yet it is also a transcendent chance to recover valuable old territory, to make it new again, and to claim as one’s own “all the beauty dancing there.” — Richard Jones | | | | Tasks of Survival
poetry coillection
|
|
|
|
