Johnson writes poetry like he’s speaking in tongues: it is strange and beautiful and sometimes affecting and if you’re earnest enough, it just might start to make sense, but also maybe it’s all just bullshit. This is why I love Denis.

There are definitely good moments and less-good moments to this collection. Some of the poems had me questioning how I should read the narrator. I ended up liking the early poems better than later ones. It's worth a go, but if I've bounced hard off a few of these, I'm not going to consider it a loss.

Good, but I like his stories better.

Not as good as his fiction, but funny.

on fire

"We understand well that we must hold
our lives up in our arms like the victims
of solitary, terrible accidents,
that we must still hold our lives to their promises
and hold ourselves up to our lives
to be sure always they are larger,
wholer, realer than we ourselves, though we
must carry them."

"Music, you are light.
Agony, you are only what tips
me from moment to moment, light
to light and word to word,
and I am here at the waters
because in this space between spaces
where nothing speaks,
I am what it says."

"Stove
at my back, warm me.
Rain on the harbor, tell me.
Dark on the day, know me.
Dark on the day, see me.
Dark on the day, help me."

This collection spans the entirety of Johnson's career, but he wasn't just a poet: he was also a writer of novels, short stories, and essays. He struggled during his twenties with drug and alcohol abuse, and you can see the evidence of that in his early work. It is often self-referential as well as social commentary. He uses his poetry to work through his own problems, to expose himself (that is evident in the examples above). He speaks about the common and mundane, but also the derelict, vagrants and vagabonds, as he could still see himself as one of them. The pieces become more surreal and heavily metaphoric the older he gets, but they all carry a weight and severity to them. An effective and affecting collection from a talented author (whom we lost too soon).

Not sure if this would be considered traditional poetry, but the blurbs of thought Johnson lays bare are incredibly intricate and exceedingly profound. Very, very impressed with this work.

Have not been a huge fan of his longer novels, but he is hands down the best short story and sheer prose author I’ve ever read.

Looking forward to more of his.

I'm starting a project to (re-)read all of Johnson's poetry, short stories and novels in publication order (I have read a lot of them already but will pick up the missing ones as I work through).

This book contains all Johnson's poetry, bringing together 4 different volumes plus some additional new poems. The first three collections were the first three things Johnson published, so I will read those before moving onto a novel and then coming back to this. Then a few more novels and then back to this. So, this review will take a long time to complete.

The Man Among The Seals
This was originally published in 1969 when Johnson was just 19 years of age. As with "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" which I read recently and which was published when McCullers was just 23, it is hard to believe that Johnson was so young when he wrote these poems.

I have to acknowledge that I am not a good poetry reader. I hardly ever (never, really) read poetry which means I have little experience and sometimes struggle. What I did here was read all the poems 2-3 times including once out loud. What is immediately clear is what I have known for a long time from reading Johnson's novels: he has a feeling for words and he uses them in ways that I respond to even in his poetry where I might not completely understand what he is doing. Read out loud, the poems feel very satisfying even though most of them are a bit down beat (the back of the book describes them as poems of grief and regret, of nightmare and acceptance, of redemption and the possibility of grace.).

I guess it's early days to comment further. I get the impression this is Johnson getting a feel for how he wants words to sound when he writes. Knowing what I already know about his novels, I imagine the poetry collections will become more sophisticated as they progress. But this is a great start and at least I can now say I have read a bit of poetry!

Inner Weather
We skip from 1969 to 1976. And the poetry also seems to grow up. Although, as noted above, I am hardly one to comment. But, to me at least, this very short collection felt more "poetic" - richer in imagery and, possibly, more obscured meanings. I'd like to re-read this collection (and may well do that before moving onto what most people seem to consider the peak of Johnson's poetry, The Incognito Lounge).

The Incognito Lounge
Woah! What just happened there? We've skipped to 1982 and Johnson's poetry has skipped several levels to land somewhere much, much higher. Even I, with my limited poetry reading experience, can understand why this collection won a prize. I wouldn't claim that I "understood" all the poems, but I was captivated by many of them. Perhaps I'll include one here to give you a sample:

Sway

Since I find you will no longer love,
from bar to bar in terror I shall move
past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth
and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,
their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,
suffer the light from the wrestling arena
to fall all over them. And what they say
blends in the tarantellasmic sway
of all of us between the two of these:
harmony and divergence,
their sad story of harmony and divergence,
the story that begins
I did not know who she was
and ends I did not know who she was.

I really liked this short collection.

The Veil
I'm trying to read Johnson's work in publication order but a review I have just seen of this collection suggests I got it slightly wrong and should have read "The Stars at Noon" first (same year - that's what fooled me).

Anyway, it feels like a large part of this collection can be captured with the phrase "the terror/ of being just one person, one chance, one set of days". I'm not sure I understood all these poems, but then I'm not sure understanding is the point. They are raw and, in reference to the the collection's title, it feels a bit like a veil has been torn away and that has exposed you to something that can't really be put into words, or, at least, not words that you can rationalise and explain.

This is a collection to re-visit. I think it would be worth reading the poems aloud and then sitting with them for a while. That said, it doesn't feel like it has the power of The Incognito Lounge.

New Poems
If working strictly to chronological order, I should have delayed this final section until after Jesus' Son, but it's so short and there is so little of the book still in your right hand when you finish The Veil that the temptation to just read on is too great and I did that. And I feel that it is a bit a weak ending to a collection that started well, got better until it peaked at The Incognito Lounge and then gradually tailed off.

Overall, 3.5 stars but rounded up because of that central collection. Several bits of this book I would like to re-visit and take more time over, so that must be a positive.

I read the first book, The Man Among the Seals.

From the award-winning poet and novelist — a must-have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

Offers the best selections from the author's previous works--including Inner Weather, The Man Among the Seals, The Incognito Lounge, and The Veil, in a collection that also features twelve original works.

One of my favorite books of poetry in existence. Thank you for this gift, Denis Johnson.

Not a big fan of his poetry. His prose is much better.