{"id":26614,"date":"2014-09-27T22:15:27","date_gmt":"2014-09-28T04:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/?p=26614"},"modified":"2014-10-05T18:30:16","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T00:30:16","slug":"uncommon-poems-kimberly-johnsons-uncommon-prayer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/artistsofutah.org\/15Bytes\/uncommon-poems-kimberly-johnsons-uncommon-prayer\/","title":{"rendered":"UNCOMMON POEMS: Kimberly Johnson’s “Uncommon Prayer”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Uncommon<\/a>Reviewed by Michael Sowder<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Poet Kimberly Johnson will appear with Meg Day in a reading and discussion of their new books at the Utah Humanities Book Festival<\/a>, Oct. 1, 2014 at 7 pm. The event is in partnership with City Arts at Salt Lake City Public Library, 210 E. 400 S., 4th floor Conference Room.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kimberly Johnson\u2019s third collection of poems, Uncommon Prayer <\/em>(Persea 2014), nicely follows her recently co-edited anthology, Before the Door of God, An Anthology of Devotional Poetry <\/em>(2013 Yale UP), which gathered devotional poetry in English (in the Judeo-Christian tradition) going back to the beginnings of English verse. Uncommon Prayer<\/em> is a stunning collection of lyrics\u2014sonnets, prayers, poems of praise, laments, monologues, prose poems\u2014which gives voice to personal and universal themes of faith\u2014religious and secular, serious and ironic, traditional and contemporary. With the fine artistry, precision, erudition, wit, and lexical magic we have come to expect from Johnson, this new collection explores dimensions of faith often avoided in contemporary American poetry. If you know Johnson\u2019s earlier work, you will not be surprised to find riffs on other voices spoken before the door of God\u2014<\/em>Donne, Milton, Herbert, Blake, Dickinson, Hopkins, Rilke, Berryman, Plath, even Eliot and Whitman, though Johnson\u2019s aesthetic casts its line more often beside the Metaphysicals than the Romantics.<\/p>\n

As does the subject of many of the poems, Uncommon Prayer <\/em>divides into three parts\u2014\u201cBook of Hours,\u201d \u201cUncommon Prayers,\u201d and \u201cSiege Psalter.\u201d The first loosely follows the pattern of medieval \u201cbooks of hours\u201d\u2014illuminated manuscripts collecting prayers, psalms, scripture, and other devotional texts arranged for reading, or praying, at prescribed times of the day: Matins, Lauds, Terce, Sext, Vespers, None, and Compline. Books of Hours were designed to help the laity align their lives more closely with the devotional lives of monks and nuns in the monasteries. Johnson\u2019s version, illuminated with painterly imagery and attuned to Johnson\u2019s pitch-perfect ear, sometimes follows and sometimes playfully wrenches awry the traditional devotional pattern.<\/p>\n

The opening poem, \u201cMatins For the Last Frost,\u201d begins with an echo of Dickinson, \u201cPatient in their dark hibernacle \/ wait the twinned lobes of the tulip bulb \/ hanging like a semicolon.\u201d That last phrase signals the ways in which the words and things of this book will enact their resurrections back and forth into each other, incarnating and dis-incarnating, with the flip of a coin or the pull of the arm of a slot machine inferred in the poem \u201cBlanks\u201d.\u00a0 While the brave tulips of \u201cMatins\u201d enact their difficult, Roethkean resurrections through the soil, the poem itself blossoms: \u201cSomewhere on the other side of town \/ some bells begin to raise their brazen; \/ everything is about to change\u2014\u201d<\/p>\n

The promise and seriousness of this poem, reminiscent of Rilke, is playfully countered in others such as \u201cNonesuch,\u201d whose title puns on the devotional hour, \u201cNone.\u201d \u201cNonesuch\u201d complains to the Deity. The speaker tells God that He shall not be the inspiration and \u201cI\u201d the mere page; not He the harrow and I the fallow field:<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not you the piston whose combusted thrust<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 shoves the rod that drives my crankshaft.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Not I the vehicle, not I the sign<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 and you the substance, you the blessed body<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 absent and sublime and I your accident.<\/em><\/p>\n

As in Hopkins\u2019s \u201cterrible sonnets,\u201d Johnson\u2019s linguistic play never lessens but only reinforces the urgency of the speaker\u2019s lament.<\/p>\n

Along with such overtly religious poems are many striking lyrics exploring the contours of gain and loss in human relationships. One of the finest is \u201cCrepuscular,\u201d which I first read in The New Yorker.<\/em> After a series of gloomy observations on an urban autumn sundown, the poem ends: \u201cThe ignition jump of a car \/ heading anywhere, taillights red \/ as the rubber stamp on a divorce decree, \/ its diminishing rev a metaphor \/ for the failure of metaphor. The car \/ is a car leaving, and then left.\u201d<\/p>\n

This section concludes with \u201cA Benediction: On the Tulpenwoede of Seventeenth-Century Holland.\u201d Here, we return to the tulip image with which the section began, in this poem blossoming into an account of the mania that seized Holland in the seventeenth-century, when a single tulip like the \u201cViceroy\u201d might fetch ten times what an ordinary laborer could make in a year\u2019s wages. The concluding lines ring one of the themes of the whole collection\u2014Wallace Stevens\u2019s theme and Buddhism\u2019s central lesson\u2014that \u201cDeath is the mother of beauty,\u201d or, more precisely here, that loss and the risk of losing are the source of longing: \u201cbelieving \/ that by loving I could hold what I loved, \/ forgetting that I loved because I couldn\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

More uncommon pleasures await us in \u201cUncommon Prayers,” Part II. Here, Johnson offers a series of inventive dramatic monologues spoken by various objects, some of which speak the ventriloquized voice of God. In these poems, God does the praying through the mouths of ordinary objects, the bug-zapper, the wrecking ball, the catapult, the Lord God Bird. In \u201cThe Bug-Zapper,\u201d one of my favorites, God calls the faithful to come and be saved, to be annihilated in glory, in a bright apotheosis. The Bug-Zapper God opens with the invitation, \u201cCome, flame-moth. Come feathered thornwing.\u201d The moth seeking the candle flame is a famous image of religious mysticism, East and West\u2014the soul seeking its annihilation in Union with the Divine. Here, God concludes his seductive prayer to us moths: \u201cMy brief lovelies, \/ Let us spark while we can. I feel a hard rain coming on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another favorite is \u201cWasp,\u201d which seems a homage to Plath and her bee poems. \u201cMy name is Legion, and my sisters\u2019 name \/ is Legion.\u201d The wasps make a din that is \u201ccommunion.\u201d <\/em>And, \u201cNow as the evening star \/\/ Nests like a queen, we swarm through the vestibule \/ Into the vault, and whisper. The paper \/\/ Whispers back. It is our stay against the wide, \/ Illegible night. It is our book of common prayer.\u201d Like the \u201cOm\u201d of Hinduism, or the Stoic\/Christian Logos, to the wasp this din is the first sound, the first word, first poem, and (bypassing Frost\u2019s \u201cstay against confusion\u201d), this din is a stay between the transcendent and the stinging flesh.<\/p>\n

Part III, \u201cSiege Psalter,\u201d is an abecedarian of prose poems (\u201cAlpha,\u201d \u201cBravo,\u201d \u201cCharlie,\u201d \u201cDelta,\u201d). Drawing upon an ancient tradition\u2014Hebrew Psalm 118\/119 is an abecedarian\u2014these psalm-lyrics voice a wide range of religious emotions, from \u201cGlory be to God for bungled things\u201d to \u201cyou love the sound of your own voice, and I have to have the last word.\u201d The poems range widely among subjects, as diverse as Shakespeare\u2019s \u201cJuliet,\u201d and \u201cRomeo,\u201d \u201cGolf,\u201d \u201cHotel,\u201d \u201cX-ray,\u201d and Alexander in \u201cIndia.\u201d My favorites are those that are most psalm-like, as my favorites in the whole collection are those that are most prayer-like\u2014those spoken in second person to Deity. In the wonderful \u201cEcho,\u201d the speaker laments, \u201cI run your reverb through my wah-wah, turn all your periods to colons; I slant, if I rhyme at all. I am here, in this deviance, and I am trying to help you find me. As if you were trying to find me.\u201d And in \u201cSierra\u201d: \u201cI\u2019m marching for that patch of green asplash at the horizon, where I\u2019m certain you await me with soft linens and peeled grapes. The ridgeline juts above it like a saw, the kind that cuts a woman in half.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most contemporary American poems of faith stumble over a perceived ironic imperative, a fear of honesty that defeats them at the gate. Johnson leaps that hurdle with grace, learning, and sophisticated wit. Reading these poems is a delight and an inspiration. We listen, privileged to be in intimate attendance to a voice speaking at the door of God.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>

Photo by Ryan Johnson Photography<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kimberly Johnson<\/a> is a poet, translator, and literary critic. Her collections of poetry include Leviathan with a Hook<\/em>, A Metaphorical God<\/em>, and Uncommon Prayer <\/em>(reviewed here). Her monograph on the poetic developments of post-Reformation poetry was published in 2014. In 2009, Penguin Classics published her translation of Virgil\u2019s Georgics<\/em>. Her poetry, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker<\/em>, Slate<\/em>, The Iowa Review<\/em>, Milton Quarterly<\/em>, and Modern Philology<\/em>. Recipient of grants and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Utah Arts Council, and the Mellon Foundation, Johnson holds an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers\u2019 Workshop, and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. Kimberly Johnson lives in Salt Lake City.<\/p>\n

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