Reviews

Ark by Ronald Johnson

jimmylorunning's review against another edition

3.0

Ronald Johnson is a great poet, and his [b:The Book of the Green Man|1342907|The Book of the Green Man|Ronald Johnson|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1267626721s/1342907.jpg|1332500] is one of my all time favorite books of poetry. And there are really great moments in this ambitious book length exploration of form, creation, myth, music, etc. But there's also a part of me that doesn't connect entirely with its wide berth. All this talk of the borealis aurora, the Milky Way, aswirl in mathematical forms, seems a bit too abstract for me. I found myself craving small poems, down to earth phrasings, tiny architectures with meager means. As for the music, sometimes it's there and wonderful. Othertimes it's there, but the words seem to take over in a completely architectural manner, as he puts it in the end: a kind of cement. I found myself wanting to hear how the poet would read it himself, as I sometimes had no idea where to pause, to slow down, to quicken up, etc. Because the phrasings often exist next to each other in non-sentencey ways, and often appear as a long string of abutments, there is very little hint as to how to take them, how to read them (I'm not talking about meaning here, I'm just talking about pacing). I wasn't sure how best to read it or listen to it in my head as I was reading it, and sometimes it sounded less than pleasing the way I imagined it. The parts of this book that I liked I really loved, but there were too many parts of it that I did not connect with for me to give it more than 3.5 stars.