Roots in Water By Kathleen Carlton Johnson

Review by Deborah K. Frontiera

Cover of "Roots in Water: Selected and New Poems" by Kathleen Carlton Johnson. Features an illustration of plant roots growing in water with leaves above, set on a textured background with shades of blue, orange, and red.The book’s title-poem, “Roots in Water” does not appear until close to the end of the book. It is about snipping a shoot from a bush and placing it in a pickle jar of water to grow a new plant. Simple, but also complex, since ALL life begins in water. The collection covers many aspects of the human experience. While not arranged chronologically, the poems could well be a memoir of the poet’s life. There are scenes from childhood, young adulthood, marriage, raising children, travels around the country and around the world, hometowns, cities, character sketches of people one meets, everyday events and extraordinary events, middle age, old age, death … the reality we will all face one day. Johnson’s poems are a photo album in words. She helps us see what she saw in each poem through her vivid descriptions. Many are selections from previously published poems, while the last section consists of new poems first set before the reader.

Several will make you think and wonder. Others will give you slices and scenes of life. Some will make you wonder if you “get it”. For example, “Canticle” provides readers with what could be seen as different names for God. Or one could see it as the passing of a single day which ends like this: “evening purple door/slow sinking into west/universal speaker pulling/the spent day box closed.” Or in “Small Towns,” the phrases of everyday life: “a place of glowing average/ … incidents live on forever/ … each corner surrenders its particular to become everyday…” Or this word/photo of Manhattan: “The subway station is urine and metal/ garnished in a week of colorful advertisements./ Waits to devour those who cannot pay/ For taxis and limousines.”

“Resting on a Sunday” invokes the thoughts: “Sunday has that blank look test/ Unfolding before the unmade bed”. A simple moment in time is elevated in the reader’s mind to importance. Johnson takes us through the seasons of the year as she sees them in deeper meaning. She knows the everydayness of the stages of life in the seasons.

While people do not like to face the reality of death, this poet lets us see the beauty and memories found when cleaning out a loved one’s dresser drawers after the funeral is over. And she brings us the peace and comfort needed to let someone go, gleaned from her experiences as a hospice chaplain. That and the emotions involved when visiting someone in a nursing home, the awkwardness of it, and the feelings of the one being visited: “Her face is telling anger and confusion/ As to how this happened/ without her consent.”

She addresses male/female issues as well in such things as a tribute to the military, the acceptance of a wife sending her husband off to “Hunting Camp”, how marriage can drop into that ho-humdrum of everydayness, which is something most of us can relate to.

And if you don’t like or don’t understand every one of them in Roots in Water, that’s okay. Relax in the ones you like, reading them over and over.


Roots in Water
By Kathleen Carlton Johnson
ISBN 978-1-61599-860-9
Modern History Press, 2025, Ret. $17.95 POETRY

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