sla book review: here and gone

here and gone

Reviewed by David Vanderwerken, Texas Christian University

JANUARY 20, 2010 archive

Here and Gone

In this his third volume of poems, Don Johnson has amassed 26 uncollected poems under the title Here and Gone along with 17 culled from his first book, The Importance of Visible Scars (1984), and 14 reprinted from Watauga Drawdown (1990), so we have a retrospective of this fine poets finest work.

Johnson could be seen as the voice of Appalachia, its climate, mountains, coves, rivers, animals, insects, and plant life. As a son of the region – West Virginia, Virginia, Tennessee, Maryland – Johnson's work reflects his intimate knowledge and abiding affection for the land. An overwhelming number of these poems contain running water, delicate perceptions of native creatures and flowers, and the orderly progression of the seasons. Yet the natural world provides an environmental context for Johnsons central concern with people, kinfolk, friends, and lovers. Well over half of his poems are dedicated to, in memory of, or in honor of specific individuals encountered on his lifes journey. Since every poet has an adopted country of the mind and heart, so does Johnson – Hawaii, a very different milieu indeed from Poca, West Virginia. His poems set in the flag's last star, however, resonate with the same authenticity as those focused on memories of Poca in the Fifties.

"History! Memory! That's what makes us human!" declaims Saul Bellow's Moses Herzog, a truism, yes, but nonetheless, true. Johnson's poems read like an archaeological dig in his mine of memories from the 1940s through the present, a seventy-year span. Given this range, Johnson's thematics are, unsurprisingly, the human body, its development, and its inevitable decay, in short, time – ultimate conqueror of all things human. A stanza from "Scatology" captures mortal decrepitude aptly:

Two days after last Christmas, I'd packed the car,
and was ready to leave when my father called me
into the cold garage to help him free the rusted knuckle
on the tractors stabilizer bar, confessing
as our hands curled around the pipe wrench
that in the last two years his body had turned to shit.

In similarly poignant, bittersweet, and unflinching tones, other Johnson poems honor grandparents, childhood friends, and first girlfriends, all ravaged by death, the artist, as Moses Herzog, again, phrases it.

As a former college athlete, a wide receiver for the University of Hawaii Manoa Rainbows (nowadays the Rainbow Warriors), Johnson gravitates to sports as another major focus in his work. Here, too, the sport-centered poems stand in for time, loss, and death, much like Robert Hamblin's verse that asserts death is always the opponent in the other teams jersey. Football, basketball, baseball, and golf figure in six poems in which readers can hear echoes of James Dickey ("The Knee"), Gary Gildner ("Rope Burns: Mad Dog, Four-Point Stance"), and Donald Hall ("Home Game").

Yet a much larger batch of poems center on a quieter, more solipsistic, and contemplative activity: fly fishing, especially for rainbow and brown trout, especially in the Watauga River. Johnson's actual home water clearly inspires his creativity and passion. It is a rare poem in this volume that omits any reference to moving water. Like other literary rivers, Johnson's Watauga has a destructive side as well. Its very creation as a coldwater trout habitat was unnatural, a technological coupling between the Tennessee Valley Authority and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to tame its wildness, its proclivity to overrunning its banks, and train it to generate electricity for the region. Johnson's selections from Watauga Drawdown movingly educate us to the disruption of thousands of lives by the construction of the Watauga impoundment in 1948. The town of Butler, TN was inundated (see "The Mayor of Butler" and "Polly Hyder Waits to Be Moved"), and the poetic persona and his buddies play

one more
game of ball before the smoothest
diamond in three counties
turned to lake bottom. ("And the River Gathered Round Us")

The housebroken Watauga River no longer explodes in havoc, and is now a fecund tailwater trout fishery where the poet connects with the vibrancy and kaleidoscopic beauty of sun, shadow, clear water, and stippled, freckled fish. The obvious joy of the poetic speaker in "Sulfur Mayflies, Cedar Waxwings, Rainbow Trout" depends on sorrows past, and the poet knows it, never forgets it, and reminds us readers to remember those ghosts.

Here and Gone: New and Selected Poems will reward a reader richly. These simple, elegant, stately, nuanced, and eloquent poems – crafted over a twenty-five year career – glow with a mature poets aura. Full of memorable, even astonishing phrasing, Don Johnson's poems will haunt you the way a seasoned Appalachian guitar pickers melodies will.

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