&luckier
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Mountain West Poetry Series
In his first collection of poems, &luckier, Christopher J Johnson explores the depths to which we can know our most intimate friends, habits, and—even more so—selves. From a mosaic of coffee cups, dinner engagements, razors, walks around his city, and the wider realm of nature, the poet continually asks to what degree our lives can be understood, our joys engaged with, and our sorrows mitigated. In a voice that is at once contemporary and yet almost primal, these poems seek an affinity with the natural world, the passing of history, and the deepness and breadth of ancestry; they do not question the mystery of life but ask rather how we have become separated from and might return to a more aware place within the frame of it. These are poems rich with metaphor and music but also direct in their voice. Johnson exhibits a poetic tradition that—rather than employing academic allusions and direct personal statements—remains elusive in its use of the poetic “I.” The reader is never certain if they are reading about the poet, their friends, or themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Johnson takes the title of his admirable debut collection from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself and that influence is evident in both form and content. Like Whitman, Johnson favors first-person declarations, but his lines are shorter and more concerned with the grand subjects of gods, immortality, and the natural world. He opens by proclaiming that "we have forgot our gods" and 12 lines later thanks the cockroach for "his persistence." Johnson knows his place on evolution's tree, though he maligns human hubris, asking, "Are our ways less applicable to death/ than the oyster who is silent& never slanders?" The interconnectivity among humans, animals, and nature is a frequent theme, that there is "separation in nothing/ but the minds of men." The capacity for immortality exists in the sublime notion of becoming stardust after death or haunting someone's thoughts as "ghosts across the cranial twitch." There is further solace in evidence of the divine; "Who but titans," he asks, could have imagined Earth into existence, and "What bulbous chaos could shape them?" Johnson possesses an often stunning capacity for imagery ("borealis bloomed like a bruise on the sky's face") and employs necessarily understated rhyme. This is a lovely homage to a hero and it will be exciting to see where Johnson goes when he emerges from Whitman's shadow.
