Review by Mack Hassler
Rome Asleep
Rome in her nightdress, nothing supporting….
Bridges across the Tiber hold islands in their sleep….
In the morning tourists will return
Fresh from hotel showers, packed in buses
That hum like arrows around the cars parked
On edges of space. (p. 15)
In Roots In Water, we find a UP poet who has ranged far from her base in Copper Country near Calumet as well as during over fifty years in the poetry business. In her reading, Johnson also has ranged widely also among other women poets. But first the geography. As in her poem above set as the epigraph, I have seen in European cities such as Rome and Florence the cars parked, even the small compact ones, aslant to the curb looking as though they might slide off into space because the actual streets are so narrow. I think for Johnson it is a good read to move front to back in the book, straight through a kind of “geography” of her poems with always a sense of sliding off into space (or at least the space of this planet) to leave home for travel The notes about Johnson and her family that it was a military family following orders and moving from base to base. Her education ranged from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg Virginia to a bit farther West at the University of Virginia. As just a baby, she reconstructs a poem about what she must have seen diving through Wyoming. By the time her travelogue of verses gets back East to a set of quatrains titled “Manhattan” it is much more tricky in the subway system where the last stanza reads:
Here you cannot stop and cry
Or you will lose your place in line.
You must know where you are going
And exactly how you will get there. (p. 34)
Several very bright stars of women poets, also, have served Johnson as guides and virtual mentors during her long journey — fifty years of publishing her poems in small chapbooks. Roots in Water is her selection from those chapbooks as well as some new poems. I think the new poems become more library focused and more “intellectual” in acknowledging her models or mentors—she has several poems with the name of Elizabeth Bishop in the title and, in her notes mentions Mary Oliver, as another starlike mentor she has studied. Right in the middle of this collection, Johnson sets two poems facing each other that image well the difference between travel and the natural world of painting, flowers, and geography over against the intellectual world of the library and reading her mentors. On p. 26 is a poem called “Small Towns” and her theme of geography. It ends, “They declare the world is flat, and believe it reverently.” Facing it is her most extensive library poem titled “Mistress of Information” about her work as a librarian and teacher where she studies and learns from Bishop and Oliver and the vast rounded universe of the intellect – not flat at all. That poem ends:
Education, I was learning,
was perfect attendance
and achievement inscribed
on a bronze auditorium plaque. p. 27
I suspect that Johnson in this very interesting collection of a life working with poetry, even as a culmination and summing up an abundance of good work, will not win one of the large “golden “ or bronze awards that her mentors have won. The competition is huge. But Johnson is a very good writer and a very interesting student of the art. I recommend her take on the complex sexuality topic for women writers, especially Bishop, in a nicely clear and powerful poem titled “The Woman Poet” p. 75. I want rather to end this review with prosody, not sexuality, because all of us are old and “retired” now (Johnson describes herself that way in her notes). The poem is called “Understanding” p. 93 and is really about the foot. This is a fine pun that refers to the poetic foot and could be modeled on a painting by Monet or other of the French Impressionists, who were favorites of Bishop. Here is the middle stanza that captures by Kathleen Johnson both her interest in travel as a Yooper as well as her polished intellectuality:
Life pushing into territories, like a shoe
the foot sliding down to the toe area
the heel snug in it own end, yet,
uncomfortable with its shape.
Roots in Water, Selected and New Poems, by Kathleen Carlton Johnson (Modern History Press, Ann Arbor, MI 48105 2025) 109 pages, pbk, $17.95.
