Essays
The Shrubberies, by Ronald Johnson
Jeffery Beam
The Shrubberies.
Ronald Johnson.
Flood Editions, 2001.
136 pages, $14.00 (paperback).
ISBN: 0971005907
|
I've written of the late poet Ronald Johnson before in these pages. Johnson died of a brain tumor in 1998 but not before creating a visionary body of work devotional in subject and in form. Near the end of his life, and after completing his epic cosmic entertainment Ark, Johnson returned home to Kansas to die, but not before writing these little poems that dig at Death's door with a garden spade, a pen, and the ringing sound of words.
The poems cultivate a garden from sound, wordplay, and syntactic and imagistic leaps: "zephyr sparkle drizzle / whistle up the wind / ask only sequence / & consequence / (bowed under sways)" Despite their sense of loss and imminent demise, the poems spin as if at a carnival and are fun and light as thistledown: "every year there is / The Night of Fireflies / rising, rising to / bower of the infinite." Johnson knew he was moving "westward into darkness / in realms of whippoorwills" and yet he could sense the ultimate delight of passing:
beyond some lillied Elysium
bordered by snowdrops
are Dejeuners sur l'Herbe
after a dip in the Jordan,
all else is illusion
("No Picnic")
As you can see these little poems need to be seen as well as heard, and their concord gathers strength as they accumulate on the page. Johnson's idiosyncratic voice will be remembered long after contemporary poetry's self-heated confessions are long gone. He now sits alongside Blake, Whitman, Basho, and Dickinson beside a burbling brook.
I must mention Flood Editions's gorgeously restrained bookmaking. The cover's simplicity with its beryl green stock and midnight blue and white text, the liver brown endpapers, the white space given the poems on the page, and the elegance of the stitching all make for a ideal match to these extravagant and miniature poems.