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jerowney's review
5.0
Poetry is difficult to do well, and that goes double for very personal, emotional poetry. I feel that there is a tendency to wallow and overindulge oneself when writing this kind of poetry, which can make the poems a lot more meaningful to the writer than to the reader.
That is not the case with this collection. Reading the subtitle "Poems of Love and Grief" made me steel myself to be bombarded with over-egged wordy elegies. What I found instead was a remarkably competent and touching set of poetry.
The poems in this collection range from haiku to free verse. Johnson packs as much palpable emotion into the haiku as he does his longer works. The imagery is spectacular and I found some of the phrasing so moving that I had to reread the poems again. Although I could of course sense the deeply personal emotions of the author, this was never distracting or self-indulgent. For anyone who has loved, and for anyone who has lost someone, this is a beautiful collection.
That is not the case with this collection. Reading the subtitle "Poems of Love and Grief" made me steel myself to be bombarded with over-egged wordy elegies. What I found instead was a remarkably competent and touching set of poetry.
The poems in this collection range from haiku to free verse. Johnson packs as much palpable emotion into the haiku as he does his longer works. The imagery is spectacular and I found some of the phrasing so moving that I had to reread the poems again. Although I could of course sense the deeply personal emotions of the author, this was never distracting or self-indulgent. For anyone who has loved, and for anyone who has lost someone, this is a beautiful collection.
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