ISBN 1876044438
ISBN 9781876044435 (13 digit)
Published 2004
111 pgs
$24.95
Nomadic
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Nomadic
1.
Shape
2. Reduction
3. Numbers
4. Text
5. Horizontals
6. Excavation
7. Possibility
Light and Skin
Rainforest Bats
Photograph of My Great Grandparents, 1880
Girl on a Paling Fence
My Dressmaking Aunt
Thirty-Four Years On
Encountering Easter Island
1.
The Shrinking
of Alice
2. The Cannibals
and the Pool of Tears
3. Painting the
Roses Red
4. The Giant
Statues and The Birdman
Hands
Amphibian
The Greenest Island
Sequence in the Style of the Liang
The
Cicada
White, White Moon
through the Window
A Lovely
Girl’s
Loneliness
In the Valley of
The Secret Orchid
Envy
Pity me!
Infidelity
1.
2.
A Woman once
Beautiful has Grown Old
The Faith of the
Ibis
Freedom
Splinters
Shipwrecks
Diving the Westralian Coast
Towards the Edge
Stone
The African Spider Cures
1.
Disappointment
2. Self Pity
3. Stagnation
Sequence in the Style of the Chin
The
Palace of Joy
Longing
The River of Heaven
Envy
Mulberry Pickers
Incense Rises
Faith
Reflective
1950’s Bedroom Cupboard
Bell
Three Faces of Shiva
1. A
Man Seeks God
Down Mohammed Ali Road
2. Ganesh
Addresses His Father
3. The Ganges Ghats
i. Dhobi
ii. Asi
iii. Jalsain
Heat
Photography at Dingo Creek, 1967
Five Poems of Light
1.
Going Home for
Her Dying
2. Watching the
Storm
3. The Day of the
Toboggan - Kosciusko, 1973
4. Bean Picking
5. Her Last Day
The Way a Lighthouse Knows Her Keeper
New Guinea Mission
Canoe
Foot
Air
From the Journals of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Mother
Landfall
Tattoos
Long Pig
Sickness and Health
What Falls Away
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Reviews
Moving
Against Complacency
Nomadic
Kristen Lang
Mattoid, No.
55, 2006
There is
a startling range of poems in Judy Johnson’s new collection,
covering
subjects and settings that travel from loss to lovemaking, from
cannibalism to a cure for stagnation, and from New Guinean forests to
shipwrecks in Western Australia. There is great contrast, too, in both
tone and accessibility. Captivating poems, the varied creations of a
strong and original poet, appear beside works in which abruptness and
incongruity render involvement difficult.
Three sequences stand out, each as exotic as the other.
Anoint your skin with dapples of
burnt butter and charcoal.
Look
up at the tree you have chosen. Take note of the muscular folds
This
from ‘The African Spider Cures’, where each image
drums a rite of
passage one feels it would be perilous to ignore. Even absurdity is
here contagiously buoyant - one tends to believe, almost smiling, that
‘under each foot / you will have sprouted the softest grade
of
toothbrush.’ ‘Three Faces of
Shiva’ is as fluently persuasive. In its
first poem, a man
imagines he is the son of Shiva
and Vishnu
riding Brahma
in
the guise of a tiger down the length and breadth of
Mohammed
Ali Road.
Without pretending to be African or to be
Indian, each sequence plies its borrowed influences to yield a fresh
and convincing vision of human realities and possibilities. With great
beauty, ‘Three Faces of Shiva’ paints images of
faith and doubt,
ambition and destiny, and of prayer and death. In one scene, a woman
descends into a river to pray and is described so intimately it is
possible almost to breathe with her. There is no more moving way to
consider what prayer is.
In ‘The African Spider Cures’,
coherency is sustained through a commitment to
‘cures’ for, in turn,
disappointment, self pity and stagnation. The mood is all-embracing,
the locations specific (Kenya, Kampala, Cairo, Fez...), and the effect
delightful. Each poem is built from directives (the addressee is
‘you’
-’your hair’, ‘your jaw’,
‘your predicament’) so cleverly phrased and
paced as to effect, rather than tyranny, a sense of licence and thrill
(like being whipped with strange coloured tulips). In the second poem,
one of these directives is so cheekily and pleasantly personal as to
elicit almost immediate admission to its simultaneous accusation.
‘It’s
time to admit’, the poem insists, ‘you did not come
to this cure
to relieve your self pity, merely to indulge it’. The
merriment is not
insubstantial - the mind, here, suffers no boredom.
‘New Guinea
Mission’ is a sequence in a different style again. These
poems tell of
a failed attempt to bring God into the jungles of New Guinea, and do so
through the private voice of the only member of the expedition who does
not turn back. Rhythmic and narrative strength support images that
other contexts would perhaps deny: ‘The sunset, a sheet / of
clotted
metal seeping into the trees’, and, ‘The hollow
cores of roots /
sucking at their own reflections / from pools of fetid water’
are here
persuasive. Indeed, belief and anticipation are the rule from the
outset of these poems. The finally revealed fate of the missionary does
not disappoint. For this reader, the sequence yields the best poems of
the collection.
Nomadic
offers many moments of brilliance. A
seven-year-old’s response to her father’s death
becomes ‘Girl on a
Paling Fence’. Here, rhythmic tension matches a balancing of
both body
and mind as the girl ‘spacewalks’ on the fence
around her garden. The
attention to detail (the girl looks down, for example, ‘to
two striped
feet with their strapped-in cargo of toes’) tilts the
emotional weight
of the poem on a fragile edge, compelling reading. The work’s
sister
poem, ‘Photography at Dingo Creek, 1967’, in which
the same girl, aged
six, is photographed by her father as she swims, is still more
powerful. Fine control in sound and sense lend a secure and deep
intimacy.
The daring with which Johnson writes, the risks taken
to describe toes as cargo, gills in timber (‘Diving the
Westralian
Coast’), death as a phone conversation between lovers
(‘Five Poems of
Light’), and to compare, as occurs in
‘Nomadic’, the finding of a
letter from a husband’s mistress to the finding of the Dead
Sea
Scrolls, are never guaranteed of success in the eyes of individual
readers. It is perhaps to be expected that where the degree of daring
is high, the number of poems that do not ‘sing’ for
a specific reader
will also be significant. ‘Rainforest Bats’ is
indeed one of many poems
offering images I cannot amalgamate. In this poem, the
‘ghosts of
orgasms’ drift ‘along the branched-ether / of urban
streetlights and
into the rainforest, where each inhabits a small, furred bat in the
canopy’. It is a cumbersome journey. Without pause, the bats
are to be
placed on a ‘green abacus’ and given voices
‘reminiscent of our playful
pillow talk’. The poem doesn’t stop here, stacking
image on image
without sufficient scaffolding for the climb into any sense of honesty.
In
‘Rainforest Bats’, the density of
Johnson’s imagery falls into clutter,
a bombardment without a frame, or light that has been confused by too
much shadow. In the sequence, ‘Encountering Easter
Island’, we are
given a report:
The ocean and a backdrop of sun
are
confused and her vision is trapped
between
horizon and the rim of window
remembering
the first mammogram
This,
too, is a difficult moment to absorb. In the strain of navigation (from
ocean to sun, to the horizon, the rim (which rim?) of a window, the
past, and finally to the subject of breast cancer) there is no time or
room for empathic involvement. Simplistically, we are told,
‘With the
tenacious amnesia / of a schoolgirl, she erased / what the Doctor had
said / one hundred times / on the blackboard of her mind’.
Too
absurdly, we learn how, ‘her body seemed eager to fly / like
an open
book, hinged / at the spine and fluttering to wings.’ There
is no
space, here, for the tenderness that seems to be invited.
The
number of such obstacles in Nomadic
is disconcerting. To visualise ‘the
cliff wind coaxing his eyebrows to wings’ (‘Towards
the Edge’), or a
hand as ‘a lesser, broken string / of knuckles to be counted
over / and
over like rosary beads’ (‘Hands’) is to
engage in a gymnastics of the
imagination that is beyond me - both beautiful ideas are marred by
their own physical impossibility.
It seems necessary to mention
that a further cause of doubt regarding the poems in Nomadic rests with
their appearance on the page. The lines in near to half of the poems
are longer than the page is wide. The disruption is severe. Single
words are often stranded on an indented second line. From
‘Diving the
Westralian Coast’, for example:
Off the Houtman Abrolhos, you
descend to a place where all motion frays.
Fish
and corals waver to an outline that could be port holes of a
ship’s
hull,
or giant wedding rings for a Jules Verne eight-tentacled bride.
It
is sometimes difficult to tell whether a sense of brokenness or
disjointedness in a poem arises from this violent distortion or from
the poem itself. It is an awful complaint to have to make.
Abruptness,
distortion, and confusion do not deny the moments in this collection of
tremendous beauty and delight. Nomadic
does not carry a strong sense of
unity. It does contain, however, instances of brilliance for which all
else is, while perhaps not forgiven, certainly tolerated. The strength
worth seeking and returning to in this collection is also worth
returning to here. In ‘Five Poems of Light’, a
woman travelling home to
her dying mother informs us, ‘It’s worth the
dizziness, the confusion
of an ox brain yoked to its own / forward motion, to turn the train
seat / backwards, show some resistance / to the future.’
There is an
insistence, here, on pushing the mind and body to where it will feel
most pressed, and in a sense most alive. If there is one thing to
cherish in Nomadic
it is this move against complacency.
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A Wandering Imagination,
Freeze-Framed
Nomadic
D’Arcy Randall
Antipodes,
Vol. 18, No. 2,
December 2004 (pgs 185-186)
[Text not yet available]
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New Poetry 2003-2004
Adrian Caesar
Westerly,
Vol. 49, November
2004
In the prefatory pages to Judy Johnson’s Nomadic, we not
only have the usual
list of acknowledged periodical publications, but also a list of some
ten or eleven prizes her poems have won. The collection has also had
the assistance of the Australia Council. Johnson is unlikely,
therefore, to be unduly worried by my carping. But almost every poem in
this volume seems to me to fit [Amanda] Lohrey’s description
of
fireworks above [the ‘literary writer’ has
‘a verbal facility...
they’re like... a set of fireworks that can just toss
adjectives or
esoteric words into the air at random and link them up in some
fascinating and preferably obscure way - which suggests that the writer
is ineffably more clever and sensitive and deep... than the
reader’ has
‘taken hold
in several critical circles’.].
As an added extra, there is a kind of specious exoticism at work in
many of the poems, which locates their imagery in the Middle East or
New Guinea or India or the West Australian outback, anywhere, it seems,
other than the Newcastle, where Johnson lives. The opening poem of the
book is also the opening poem of the Nomadic sequence; it is entitled
‘Shape’ and begins like this:
This afternoon while looking for
my watch
I
found a love letter
from your mistress.
In
1947 while searching
for his lost goat
A
Bedouin boy found the
Dead Sea Scrolls.
There is no connection between
the two
events.
This is plain enough, but plainly unhelpful - an anti-metaphor pointed
out by a banal and bathetic line. Here’s how the poem
proceeds:
I exist continents away from the
Qumran
monastery.
And
words on paper
predicting a future
cannot
compare with
copper scrolls
etched
with clues to a
biblical past.
Yet
I encounter
coincidence. As a snail shell
may
only reveal the
extent of its secrets when the snail
is
crushed, so each
ancient carapace crumbled as it unrolled.
And
I am broken also,
unravelling this script from eye
to
tongue. It is not so
much the shell that cannot take
the
pressure. It is the
space beneath the shell,
that
once upheld its
shape.
The poet is right, of course: one cannot compare the discovery of a
love letter with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So why are we
bothering?
Because of a ‘coincidence’. What this coincidence
might be is not
vouchsafed us - the date, perhaps? Maybe the letter is her
father’s.
Yet the next poem in the sequence seems to be about the
poet’s
marriage. Who knows? What is certain is that the poet is not going to
help us out, because that would make it all too easy.
Returning to the ‘coincidence’, we also return to
the tortured syntax
of the next sentence and the even more tortured simile and metaphor it
introduces. Leaving aside for the moment the
‘secrets’ of the ‘snail
shell’, let’s consider the way the simile unhinges
following the word
‘so’. The first term of the simile is about the
relationship between
shell and snail; the second concerns the shell only: we are asked to
consider the unlikely possibility of an ‘unrolling
carapace’. What are
the referents of this metaphor? If the scrolls or the letter or the
poet are like the snail shell, where or what or whom is the crushed
snail?
The rest of the poem does not help. The poet (like the snail and the
shell) is also broken - so much is clear. But then a third term is
introduced to the metaphor i.e. the ‘space beneath the
shell’. That
would appear, appropriately enough, to be air - hot perhaps? The
metaphor doesn’t work. And the point of a comparison (which
isn’t a
comparison) between the love letter and the Dead Sea scrolls remains
obscure.
I cannot leave this book without also mentioning a poem called
‘Towards
the Edge’ which describes a man ‘drunk and naked on
the cliff top’, who
is ‘spinning on his body’s axis’. The
middle stanza describes an
‘aerodynamic principle / that has his penis flare outwards
like a /
helicopter blade’. One would have thought that a drunk
behaving in this
manner on a cliff top had enough problems without this serious
anatomical worry, which beggars exegesis.
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Nomadic
Robyn
Rowland
Blue Dog,
Vol. 3, No. 6,
November 2004
There is a deep satisfaction in reading poetry when its craft presents
us with an innovative way of viewing imagistic connection, or surprises
us with unusual juxtapositions of objects and nature. Judy Johnson
invites us in Nomadic
to
journey with her like this, both through time and place, and through
threaded images, into the heart of those things that matter to her. At
the personal level, there is the end of love; the small child closeted
literally in the past; a girl dealing with her father’s
death; her
father’s love frozen behind photography and her
mother’s passing away.
At the political level, there is the poet’s desire to hold up
to us our
own unjustified dissatisfaction with life compared to, for example, the
deprivation and suffering of Africa.
Her first book, Wing
Corrections
(Five Islands Press, 1998) contained well-crafted short poems that used
a brightness of image powerfully. In Nomadic,
this skill with images has expanded into a mature and more complex
form. Often, rather than evoking feeling, the poems strike the reader
with awe at the turned image, at the way they clarify understanding.
The craft is impressive. Here mere are chains of images - lines on a
map perhaps - often discrete and seemingly disconnected objects or
creatures, that become our trail: theirrelationship to each other
exposed by the poet so that we see them anew, reshaped.
In ‘Girl on a Paling Fence,’ we move from the image
of the girl
balancing on the fence, to her dead father lying in the house, ready
for visitors. The experience is woven through a sweep of particulars
that draw us into a visual picture of the moment. The girl’s
sandals
are blue, like the colour of a plastic necklace of her
mother’s that
the girl once broke and hid, ‘piling its kaleidoscope of /
planets into
a box under her bed. Now she threads herself / along the string
offence...’.
We look down at the the girl’s ‘two striped feet
with their strapped-in
cargo / of toes’. Her mother is drowning in grief:
‘all morning her
mother’s / eyes have been brown stones sinking beneath the
weight of /
water’. The girl has taken objects from her
father’s bedside table - a
tobacco tin and a pipe: she doesn’t touch ‘the
heaviness of the objects
she has taken for fear of a similar drowning / ...She keeps the two
apart by the warmth of a body-width. She measures their coldness this
way / as she measures the fence / by the flat spaces where she can
place her feet and not by the spikes that divide them’.
Finally, her
lonely grief is caught as she balances ‘...the pipe on one
side,
tobacco tin / on the other and in the middle, her unlit
heart’.
Johnson has a deft hand with nature. I am delighted by the variations
on the moon that as a crescent in ‘Excavation’
(‘Nomadic’ sequence)
‘hangs like a pale cheese in a muslin sack’, and
transforms into ‘the
ghost gum moon’ in ‘Thirty-four years
on’. In ‘Going home for her
dying’ it becomes ‘that jack-o-lantern tuber, / the
moon, the colour of
pumpkin the only way my mother liked it. Rind / as hard as charity and
inside, the flesh dry as orange dessicated coral’.
In her hands, the ocean is brim-full of intent, of secrets and of a
fever for understanding. In ‘Shipwrecks’
‘The ocean / mocks the
geometric absolutes land aspires to, and surface / becomes another
dimension, as the breeeze-pampered sailcloth / of your skin adapts to
the heavy press of atmospheres’. ‘Diving the
Westralian coast’ leaves
us ‘just suspended at the / border between
estrangements’. In the
captivating poem ‘The Way a Lighthouse Knows her
Keeper’, it is the
inanimate lighthouse made living that holds the keeper above the
‘caw
and cackle of ocean’ the ‘colour of that
middle-blue Faber / Castelle
pencil’.
In another fine poem, ‘Stone’, it is the land that
becomes animate as
it draws the carvers to itself ‘yearning for
transformations’. ‘Stone
predicts in its own time and way’ and as the suicide falls,
it is
practising its shapechanging. The faster they fall, the smoother // and
more impassive the face, until those who go this way are so reminded /
of their own elusive god, that in the end the brokenness barely
surprises them’.
Johnson knows that she’s playing the line between image and
reality;
between image and its meaning; between image and feeling, felt and
conveyed. ‘Image’ she warns, ‘divides us
from who we really are’
(‘Light and skin’). She is at her best when
interlocked images flow
from her naturally, without expectation. It may fall flat though, when
the stretch of the image is overdone and the poem seems to be trying
too hard to find that odd juxtaposition which is her forte. In
‘The
Giant Statues and the Birdman’ (‘Encountering
Easter Island sequence’)
the statues are ventriloquists that moan in the wind
‘exhaling warm
breath on summer nights / like honey mixed with talc’. Here
the
lightness of breath and talc, mix uncomfortably with dense honey, so
the line doesn’t succeed for me.
A lot is travelling on those directed collages of image. They
frequently set us up for the last significant lines. Nature and animals
are often transformed into otherness, our selves in some form, so that
we are enticed to anthropomorphize ourselves in order to find the nub
of meaning in the poem; in life. In ‘Amphibian’,
there is a merging of
lover with tadpole/frog. In ‘Rainforest Bats’ the
‘ghosts of orgasms’
drift from bedrooms to inhabit the bats and their squeaks are
‘our
playful pillow talk’. The ‘points of inevitability
we pass in /
lovemaking acts’, ‘move us towards a larger
dying’. The rustling of
leaves and bats in the forest leaves us ‘...unable
to decide if the
corresponding flutters we feel / are the beginnings of arousal, or the
unfolding wings of fear’.
In ‘The African Spider Cures’, a substantial and
complex sequence, we
are to become the spider, to ‘lurch side to side... / until
you feel
the shuffle of fine hair on your legs and back... extend your
incisors...’.
This sequence takes us wandering through Africa: its colour, its pain,
its endurance. We are shown how we weave our discontent while others
live life hard. Inside the spider - trapdoor, huntsmen - on the floor
of the forest or strung across the river - we are without language and
can ‘consider the wisdom of silence’. We are
admonished to admit our
self-pity, our inner poison, and in our smallness, the animal we have
become: ‘Watch
it
twist and turn inside the silk it’s rolled in, stuck
to / what you are determined it will neither die of, nor escape from /
while ever you are so dexterous at weaving discontent’
(‘2SelfPity’).
The web becomes the image of entanglement, of connection, of death, of
safety, of buoyancy and of persistence. The web itself is a powerful
symbol: when spider webs unite, they can tie up a lion, so the
Ethiopian saying goes. Spider silk itself can be curative.
I’m
searching for meaning here. We are I think, left with the
poet’s own
challenging ambivalence in the meaning of the spider’s cure.
Moving from the creation of a drum from the Baobab tree, as spider we
move up into the trees, along the Argungu, thrown from Krakatoa,
through Kampala alongside the Masai, into Levubu, Fez, Morocco,
Somalia, the Sahara and finally Victoria Falls. All the while, the
harsh driving tone of the poet is making sure we haven’t
missed the
sharp edges of the journey. And why? To drop our easy self-indulgence,
our one-eyed first world vision, while recognising the connections
between all things and the web that holds us: ‘Take
it as a sign. Know
that there’s nothing else for it, but to persist. /
It’s either that,
or stand stiff as a cliff-edge old testament prophecy / and be eroded
just the same, while the migratory world keeps falling and falling’.
In this sequence Johnson also reveals her poetics, her process. In
‘Flying’ in her first book, she wrote: ‘Not
so easy to dismantle the
puzzle / and see flying for what it is, / what most things are: // a
set of compromises - a series / of subtle wing corrections / to make
the pieces fit’.
Reminiscent of this unveiling, she writes in ‘The
African Spider Cures’:
‘...Let
these
images collide, as well as all those other / childhood
antidotes and poisons. Allow each its own freeze frame, but
see
// how they are all recorded against the same backdrop, so. like an
early / animation, the light thumb of dreams may flick through the
pages / creating a seamless movie’
(1. Disappointment).
This ‘freeze frame’ recurs throughout the book as
method and image: in
‘Heat’, ‘Thirty-four years on’,
‘Watching the storm’ (in ‘Five Poems of
Light’). In ‘Photography at Dingo creek,
1967’ the father photographer
misses the lived moment to capture it in the camera, ‘her
childhood /
preserved like the fossil of some sea-going creature ...to trap her in
the infinitesimal shutter-speed wink / between the moment and the
moment’s loss’. Ironically, she is caught too,
between the living of it
and the recording of it. Yet here is a purpose of poetry: to be the
snapshot album of moment.
Interestingly, poems about a girl’s father dying that occur
in three
poems, speak from the third person. Yet the poem on her
mother’s dying
is first person direct. In these poems feeling is more strongly
conveyed in comparison to the more distanced, yet finely crafted,
‘traveller’ works, through Easter Island, New
Guinea, Africa.
Personally, I like to be moved by poetry, and the title sequence,
‘Nomadic’, which captured the sadness of a
relationship ending, and the
familial poems, are closest to the heart. The ‘Five poems of
Light’ for
the poet’s mother are deeply moving and loving poems, as
Johnson
remembers a childhood (‘childhood splinters are working their
way out’
we are told in ‘Splinters’) through to her
mother’s death. Some of the
strongest writing is here, with its crisp imagery, moving narrative and
precision of craft. I love the crystalline beauty of ‘3. The
Day of the
Toboggan - Kosciusko 1973’ and the beautiful flowing lines
following a
kite outside the hospital window to the inevitable death: her mother
‘hungry all her life’, at the end
‘...relaxed on the pillow, intent on
becoming the bone / the flesh spends all its life peeling back from in
incidental layers. // Until, by nightfall, the spars shone through,
devoid of unnecessary material: a frame / that the air eventually lost
patience with supporting // and plummeted to earth. Leaving nothing to
show she had ever flown except, // in the broken room, still attached,
// our long trail of sorrow’ (5. Her Last Day).
Rarely does Johnson seem uncertain of what she wants to convey. But
with the folding and unfolding of image, there is a risk that purpose
outside image might become lost, the poem fading merely into a made
thing, an artifact. ‘Heat’ might be one of these,
the concluding lines
falling diffidently, compared to the wonderful twisted word usage of
‘Splinters’ with its ‘lung-thirst of
sawdust; a smell of / imprisoned
forests and hard rain sifted / from an axe-cut sky’.
I felt that the two sequences following Chinese poetry read a little
like exercises in mimicry, detracting from Johnson’s own
voice. Line
endings seem crucial to me in the creation of the poet’s
voice: the
voice that captivates; that guides; that invigorates or impassions.
Line breaks direct the living pulse of breath, with its essential
shadow - stillness/no breath. The breath units of voice drive the
rhythm of the poem, which is crucial to the success of free verse
poetry. Sometimes movement into varying form on the page enhances the
quality of directness in communication of voice.
Johnson wrote in ‘The woman who painted the sky’ (Wing Corrections):
‘the critics
said for years she was too predictable, / painting only one shade of
sky’ …so ‘in the end she
compromised’ - ‘they said her art had come of
age, / but it felt like selling out’ and ‘she never
had the dream again
where her body / let go its own blue centre and spiralled / up to light
like egg white / in glass blown air’.
This is always the risk of falling for fashions in form, and Johnson
tells us here that she knows it. So I felt disappointed when I read the
prose poems. Unpunctuated, they made the inner reader stumble looking
for breath, trying to find a flow that was blockaded by an invisible
fence. They seemed to lack the energy and intensity of the free verse
forms. I was, however, delighted to find such faults, bearing in mind
the Persian carpet makers’ belief that flaws have to exist
in, or in
fact need to be added to, the best of rugs to ensure the weaver will
not be struck down for impersonating the perfection of god. Nomadic carries the
weft and weave
of well-made poetry, and for this, it is a pleasure to read.
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Nomadic
Geoff Page
Books and Writing,
Radio National, 25 July
2004
It is difficult to find a single poem in Judy Johnson s first
full-length collection
Nomadic,
that one could consider typical. As with most first books, the poems
range widely in theme and technique but the poem ‘Her Last
Day’ is a good starting place. Like many other pieces in the
collection, it moves at a leisurely pace and chooses its metaphors
carefully but seemingly without effort. The literal kite that
accompanies the poet’s mother s last afternoon is seen as a
ship
or maybe a bird. The uncertainty mirrors the mother s dialogue with
death, the tug and let go of things.
In some ways, the poem is an essay as much as it is a story. The phrase
for instance precedes the stunning simile for the way neither the
mother s heart nor lung will hang up first. They are like lovers on the
phone to each other. The fragility, the delicate balance of the dying
woman’s situation, is elaborated in a series of images
increasingly emphasising her insubstantiality. Eventually there is
nothing to show that she has ever flown except in the broken room,
still attached, our long tail of sorrow.
Johnson’s particular ability is to take an image and develop
its
full potentiality through a series of closely-related images, each one
adding emotional force to the original premise. The images are not
simply logical deductions, nor are they free flights of surrealism;
rather they are something in between with the characteristics of both.
Sometimes, as in ‘Sequence in the Style of the
Liang’ and
‘Sequence in the Style of the Chin’, Johnson is
able to
inhabit another culture and historical period and discover perennial
truths in a style which is obviously derivative at one level and yet,
at another, seems to have much of the same force, as many of the best
poems are written in the time and place chosen.
She also has a particular feeling for the geography of the Pacific, its
cultures and the colonial or quasi-colonial ventures which occur there.
‘Encountering Easter Island’ is an early example,
and the
book finishes with two sequences of this kind: ‘New Guinea
Mission’ and ‘From the Journals of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Mother’. The latter comprises five
unpunctuated
prose poems, showing the same sharpness of observation that Stevenson
himself was noted for. Johnson has his mother displaying more than a
little wry humour at the cultural gap horizontal rather than vertical
between herself and the Polynesians. In ‘Long Pig’,
for
instance, one elderly man explained that the hand had been his
favourite morsel because he could accommodate each finger one by one in
his mouth. Undeterred, Mrs Stevenson tucks in to the roast boar but
assures the reader after some exchange of gifts to cement family
connections that under no circumstances shall I turn cannibal to fit in
with our new found relatives.
All this should not give the impression that Johnson is concerned only
with the exotic. There are many poems rooted solidly in Australian
landscapes, both literal and emotional. ‘Photographs of my
Great
Grandparents’ is just one example, so too are
‘Stone’, ‘1950s Bedroom
Cupboard’, and
‘Heat’. All are concerned with mental states but
all have
their parallel, and often their origins, in particular Australian
geographies.
Johnson is obviously influenced by the poetry of other cultures,
including the American, but there is no mistaking her Australianness.
Not necessarily a virtue, of course, but nevertheless an important part
of the book’s likely reception by Australian readers. It is
worth
noting too that Judy Johnson has won an extraordinary number of poetry
prizes. Given the makeup and vagaries of some judging committees, this
is not always significant but in Johnson’s case one can see
what
impressed such a wide variety of judges. Johnson seems to know how to
really get into a topic. She is not one to just sketch an attitude and
let it go at that. She wants to investigate the thing more thoroughly
and does so by poetic means rather than those offered by either
academic research or standup comedy, to name two frequently used
alternatives. Along with Bronwyn Lea’s and
Adrienne Eberhard’s
first books, Judy Johnson’s
Nomadic is
certainly setting a higher standard for first collections than we had
become used to just a few years back.
Back to top
Perennial
Truths and Sharp Observation
Nomadic
Geoff Page
The Canberra Times,
26 June 2004
Newcastle poet Judy Johnson, who has just published her first
full-length collection, has already won an extraordinary number of
poetry prizes. Given the make-up and vagaries of judging committees
this is not always significant but in Johnson’s case one can
readily see what impressed such a wide variety of judges. Johnson knows
how to really get into a topic. She is not one to just sketch an
attitude and let it go at that. She wants to investigate the issue more
thoroughly - and does so by poetic means rather than through academic
research or stand-up comedy, to name two frequently used alternatives.
In poem after poem in
Nomadic
Johnson takes an image and develops its full potential through a series
of closely related images, each one adding force to the original
premise. Such associations are not simply logical deductions; nor are
they free flights of surrealism. Rather they are something in between,
with the characteristics of both.One can see this process in her
‘Sequence in the Style of the Liang’ and
‘Sequence in
the Style of the Chin’. Here Johnson proves herself well able
to
inhabit another culture and historical period. In them she discovers
perennial truths via a style which is obviously derivative at one level
and yet, at another, has something of the same force as many of the
best poems written in the original time and place. Johnson also has a
particular feeling for the geography of the Pacific, its cultures and
the colonial (or quasi-colonial) ventures which occurred there.
‘Encountering Easter Island’ is an early example
and the
book finishes with two sequences of this kind, ‘New Guinea
Mission’ and ‘From the Journals of Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Mother’. The latter comprises five
unpunctuated
prose poems showing the same sharpness of observation that Stevenson
himself was noted for. Johnson has Stevenson’s mother
displaying
more than a little wry humour at the cultural gap (horizontal rather
than vertical) between herself and the Polynesians. In ‘Long
Pig’, for instance, one elderly interlocutor explains that
the
hand used to be ‘his favourite morsel because he could
accommodate each finger one by one in his mouth’. Undeterred,
Mrs
Stevenson tucks into her ‘roast boar’ but assures
the
reader, after some exchange of gifts to cement family connections, that
‘under no circumstances shall I turn cannibal to fit in with
our
newfound relatives’.
These examples should not, however, give the impression that Johnson is
concerned only with the exotic. There are many poems rooted solidly in
Australian landscapes, both literal and emotional.
‘Photographs
of My Great Grandparents’ is just one example. So too are
‘Stone’, ‘1950s Bedroom
Cupboard’ and
‘Heat’. All are concerned with mental states but
all have
their origins in particular Australian geographies. Johnson is
obviously influenced by the poetry of other cultures, including the
American, but there is no mistaking her Australianness - not
automatically a virtue, of course. Nevertheless, it will, I suspect,
form an important part of the book’s appeal to Australian
readers.
There have been several outstanding first collections of poetry
recently (those of Bronwyn Lea and Adrienne
Eberhard
spring to mind). Judy Johnson’s
Nomadic is also in
that class.
Back to top
Review
Nomadic
Andrea Breen
Island, No.
98, Spring 2004
The poems in Judy Johnson’s collection
Nomadic cut to the
quick. Each one
voices the internal struggle for self-understanding and they are
expressive too of the baffling experience of living in the external
world.
Structurally, these poems shift between concise formal poems and longer
experimental forms, such as ‘Three Faces of Shiva’
where enjambment,
gaps between words and single lines widely spaced work to test the
reader. This fractured structure is congruent with the images and
subject and suggests linguistic stumbling.
We
watch from further out on a small
leaf-shaped
boat
not knowing what to make
of the single human hand
that floats
past
nor the purifying
tiger that roars and crackles on shore
sears
with its
dozen burning eyes.
In some senses this collection is like a travelogue, as many poems
recall destinations visited by the traveller. In
‘Heat’, the discomfort
of searing temperatures, for an anonymous woman subject, suggests
universal experience:
There
is no sign of rain and the woman
has not yet dropped the
steaming
paleness
of her dress near the
fence and let
the sky
fall in medusa tongues.
But it will
come...
The volume connects with a wide range of women’s experiences,
such as
in the free form poem ‘My Dressmaking Aunt’:
‘...the gravity of choices
never made bearing down or what fell to the floor day after day the
scraps she made a life of when all the matrons had gone home’.
These songs from lived experience that are Judy Johnson’s
poems tell
many tales in an assortment of ways. The fragmentation of structure is
sometimes disconcerting yet this volume makes very good bedside reading.
Back to top
Winners, Losers &
Other
Liz Winfield
Famous Reporter,
No. 29, June
2004
Don’
t get
comfortable for any of these books;
do not expect to be in
control of where you will be taken, and don’
t
expect to return
unscathed by poetry.
Judy Johnson’
s
Nomadic is
worth buying if only for the poem ‘My
Dressmaking Aunt’,
a poem I
recently read at a workshop to show how a block-poem or prose-poem
works and why it is poetry and not prose. I later spoke to a workshop
member to find she’
d
ordered the book - no
mean feat to find a
contemporary poetry book in Hobart - and was reading it slowly to make
the experience last as long as possible. I said I was on my third read,
and it was still just as good as the first time, like the Tim Tam box
that never empties.
My only problem is with the presentation; compare ‘My
Dressmaking Aunt’
as it is presented here with its presentation in Island No. 95. The
lay-out makes
the
words look clumsy and awkward, but the poetry does overcome it.
Take the beginning of ‘The
Way a Lighthouse Knows Her Keeper’
:
Loneliness and retreat are two sides of the same peninsula. She
knows this
and stalks him with her single eye glass. She watches him walk
the
parapets as if
The poet plays with words, meanings, cliches, styles, forms and
emotions like a conjurer. The title Nomadic
holds the collection
together as loosely and definitely as the word ‘family’
holds people
together. I could write you a great academic review on this collection
but think the time would be better spent reading the collection itself.
Back to top
Beyond Matter
Oliver Dennis
Australian Book Review,
No. 262, June/July 2004
...
Let these dreams collide, as well as all those other
childhood
antidotes and
poisons.
Allow each its own freeze frame,
but see
how they
are all recorded
against the same backdrop, so, like an early
animation,
the light thumb of
dreams may flick through the pages
creating a
seamless movie.
In these lines, taken from ‘The
African Spider Cures’
,
Judy Johnson
might almost be describing her poetics. Nomadic, Johnson’
s
second poetry
collection, consists of well-made poems that combine objective views of
the world with snippets from the poet’
s
personal life. In the title
poem, which centres around a recent separation, Johnson compares her
experience of finding an illicit love letter with a Bedouin
shepherd-boy’
s
chance discovery of the Dead
Sea Scrolls: ‘There
is no
connection between the two events,’
she
writes, ‘Yet
I encounter
coincidence.’
Throughout the book, Johnson brings together mythology, family history,
travel scenes and childhood memories; but, whatever the subject, there
is always a strong emotional element in her writing. It is particularly
evident in Johnson’
s
moving conclusion to an
elegy for her mother, who
‘[l]eaves
nothing /
to show she had ever flown except, // in the broken
room, still attached, // our long tall of sorrow’
.
One of the major strengths of this poetry is its ability to surprise
and unsettle the reader with ingenious imagery or phrasing. While
Johnson has an occasional tendency to indulge in overly elaborate
explication (‘The
African Spider Cures’
,
for example, uses up a
lot of
space, only to make a fairly lame point about the importance of keeping
one’
s
grievances in perspective), many of her
lines bear witness to an
admirable restraint. Consider ‘My
limbs by association climb the walls’
(‘Possibility’
)
and the following account, from ‘Girl
on a Paling
Fence’
, of ‘two
striped feet with their strapped-in cargo of toes’
.
Indeed, it comes as little surprise to find that Johnson has been
inspired to imitate the poetry of two early Chinese dynasties, the
Liang and the Chin. The best of Nomadic
owes much of its success to the constraining influence of form. For an
imagination as restless and enquiring as Johnson’
s,
there could be no
better foil.
Back to top
Using
Poetic Images to get to the heart of the
matter
Geoff Page
The Canberra Times,
1 May 2004
Newcastle poet Judy Johnson, who has just
published her
first
full-length collection, Nomadic,
has already won an extraordinary number of prizes. Given the make-up
and vagaries of judging committees this is not always significant, but
in Johnson's case one can readily see what impressed such a wide
variety of judges. Johnson seems to know how to really get into a
topic. She is not one to just sketch an attitude and let it go at that.
She wants to investigate the issue more thoroughly and does so by
poetic means rather than through academic research or stand-up comedy,
to name two frequently used alternatives.
In poem after poem in this book, Johnson takes an image and develops
its full potentiality through a series of closely related images, each
one adding force to the original premise. Such associations are not
simply logical deductions; nor are they free flights of surrealism.
Rather, they are something in between, with the characteristics of both.
One can see this process in her ‘Sequence
in the Style of the Liang’
and ‘Sequence
in
the Style of the Chin’
.
Here Johnson proves
herself
able to inhabit another culture and historical period. Here she
discovers perennial truths in a style which is obviously derivative at
one level and yet, at another, has something of the same force as many
of the best poems written in the time and place chosen.
She also has a particular feeling for the geography of the Pacific, its
cultures and the colonial (or quasi-colonial) ventures which occurred
there. ‘Encountering
Easter Island’
is an early example, and the
book
finishes with two sequences of this kind, ‘New
Guinea Mission’
and
‘From
the Journals
of Robert Louis Stevenson's Mother’
.
The later comprises five unpunctuated prose poems showing the same
sharpnes of observation for which Stevenson himself was noted. Johnson
has Stevenson’
s
mother displaying more than a
little wry humour at the
cultural gap (horizontal rather than vertical) between herself and the
Polynesians. In 'Long Pig’
,
for instance, one
elderly interlocutor
explained that the hand had been 'his favourite morsel because he could
accommodate each finger one by one in his mouth’
.
Undeterred, Mrs
Stevenson tucks into her ‘roast
boar’
but
assures the reader, after
some exchange of gifts to cement family connections, that ‘under
no
circumstances shall I turn cannibal to fit in with our newfound
relatives’
.
These examples should not, however, give the impression that Johnson is
concerned only with the exotic. There are many poems rooted solidly in
Australian landscapes, both literal and emotional. ‘Photograph
of My
Great-Grandparents’
is just one example. So
too are ‘Stone’
,
‘1950s
Bedroom Cupboard’
and ‘Heat’
.
All are concerned with mental states but
all have their parallel - and often their origins - in particular
Australian geographies. Johnson is obviously influenced by the poetry
of other cultures, including the American, but there is no mistaking
her Australian-ness - not necessarily a virtue, of course.
Nevertheless, it will, I suspect, form an important part of the book’
s
appeal to Australian readers. There have been several outstanding first
collections of poetry recently (those of Bronwyn Lea and
Adrienne Eberhard spring
to mind). Judy Johnson’
s
Nomadic
is also in that class.
Back to top
Stephanie Trigg (academic)
19th June, 2004
Note: Judy Johnson’s Melbourne launch has been rescheduled
for later in
2004, however Stephanie Trigg’s comments on
Nomadic are set out
below.
‘Sickness and Health’
get out your big atlas and
imagine a
straight line from san francisco to anaho the n e corner of nuka hiva
imagine three weeks there and then one days sail to tai o hae followed
by a five day junket to farakava then onwards to tahiti back in
edinburgh (which had his lungs skipping from ill to ill like a mossed
stone over a pond) louis said he would be happy to visit the islands
like a ghost and be carried by the natives like a bale in reality he
rails at how his constitution slows him down his cold has taken a turn
for the much worse and as often happens so has his temper consequently
he doesn’t much like tahiti seeing it as a halfway house
between
civilisation and savagery and the land crabs are bothersome the ground
riddled with their bunker holes what’s more he
didn’t come halfway
round the world to still be a poorly specimen etc he calls himself the
old man virulent even as the little girls play a native form of
hopscotch beyond his window to amuse him chanting their charming songs
and princess moe cooks dishes especially for his invalid dinner while
in comparison (and i fear this may be part of the problem) fanny is
hale and hearty having a jolly old time quite une femme tahitienne as
she lays on a pillow in the chief’s smoking room taking a
whiff of
native cigarette each time it is passed her way.
Launch speeches are always rather tantalising: the more you hear about
the poetry, the more you want to hear the poetry itself, and the voice
of the poet. So it seemed a good idea to let Judy Johnson have the
first word from this wonderful collection. That was ‘Sickness
and
Health’,
the third
in a sequence of four prose poems based on the
diaries of Robert Louis Stevenson’s mother. It bears many of
the
hallmarks of the book. Simple directness - ‘get
out your big atlas’
-
alternates with luminous metaphors like ‘his
lungs skipping from ill to
ill like a mossed stone over a pond’;
threaded along a range of voices
and perspectives. The petulant and ailing writer, his sardonic mother,
and the annoyingly healthy wife languidly going troppo on the couch,
all appear against the background of the ‘native
carriers’
and the
Tahitian chief’s
own family entertaining and
amusing the westerners.
Nomadic is
a rich and powerful
collection of poems, distinguished by Johnson’s capacity for
empathetic
engagement with a range of voices, male and female, young and old. This
is poetry without a grand ego, but with a strong sense of self; a
collection without a single dominant narrative voice, but presenting a
poetic voice that is confident and assured. The themes are sometimes
tragic, organised around loss, illness, and ageing, but Johnson also
writes beautifully about youth, memory and sex. Throughout this
collection, she brings together the physical, material qualities of
rhythm, and other more cerebral qualities of language to construct
fabulous metaphoric structures that are never strained, but that always
intrigue.
From ‘Hands’...
My hands are not religious,
remembering prayers
of
childhood unanswered.
Instead they engage
in
private worship with a
congregation of ten.
Like
spinster sisters who
daily plait each others’
hair
my hands plait each
other’s fingers. They
have
been known to
humour
a stranger’s palm
for
a
time, but inevitably
reject transplanted flesh,
returning
to their
symmetrical twin, with the
decisive
snap of a
purse-clasp shut by a miser.
Johnson’s imagery always brings with it this emotional
charge; it bears
little relationship to the simple science of defamiliarisation. Another
poem, ‘Rainforest
Bats’
also begins
with an intriguing image. What
happens to the ghosts of orgasms after they leave our bodies? They
drift out into the street and into the rainforest, of course, each
inhabiting ‘a
small, furred bat in the canopy’.
The poem explores this
fabulous conceit with exuberance but brings it back home with a
disturbing ambiguity. The poem insists on the reality of the conceit:
it is not just an amusing image, but generates a perfectly gothic
quandary:
... as we look up to dark
rustling
in
the leaves the pits of
our stomachs unable to decide
if
corresponding flutters
we feel
are
the beginnings of
arousal, or the unfolding wings of fear.
The tour de force of these startling metaphysics is the love poem of
the lighthouse to her keeper.
She will be his tall and
gawky P.E.
teacher in whitewash garb.
He will be
her overstretched and weatherbeaten pupil. Despite all this,
she is aware she has failed him
as a lover. No object of his schoolboy fantasies; too phallic for
rubenesque-and-splitting
peach pits of flesh in the becalment of his dreams...
Moreover, there is a sense in which the keeper knows her too much. ‘The
way he knows her inside out. The twirling staircase of her gut’.
But
just as the imagery threatens to become too literal, Johnson pulls back.
And yet they have their moments. Like when they both look out at the
same time to an ocean most days the colour of that middle-blue Faber
Castelle pencil.
And he tells her, as he always
does
(as if relating an outing to
an
invalid) how the water
tastes
exactly of the
middle-blue shavings in the bottom of his
pencil
box
held
on the tongue: a
thin cyanic tingle at the top margin of
surface...
The more personal poetry in this collection explores the relation
between interior states and the external world, reminiscent of
Elizabeth Bishop, perhaps. In several sequences, Johnson writes ‘in
the
style of’
early
Chinese poetry, with just enough of what is exotic and
foreign to us mixed with what we can recognise: in a poem about a wife
weaving silk, we hear ‘the
faint srr, srr of the cicadas’ loom’.
Or in
a poem about mother and daughter:
My bed lies empty, lost to clear
dust.
I
watch my daughter apply
beauty spots.
She
plays at sticking
them between her eyebrows.
She
paints kohl on her
eyelids.
The
white moon knows what
lies inside my daughter.
It
will soon undo her
scarlet ribbons.
This is truly nomadic, global poetry. Its themes and subjects come from
a range of literary topoi and cultural forms: the Easter Islands,
Tahiti, Puerto Rico, medieval China, the shipwreck coast of Western
Australia, some particularly gothic stories of African spiders, the
mythological life of the Indian god Ganesh. The collection draws some
extraordinary analogies and juxtapositions - in the title poem, the
destruction of a marriage and its after effects with the lives of
Bedouin nomads; or the experience of breast cancer with the tribal
cultures of Easter Island. The woman at the centre of this poem buys a
carved wooden figure. Like mastectomy surgeons, the sculptors make
"ismall
incisions
here and there’
as
they carve their minimal figures,
then add fragments of shell and stone for human features:
The ears and eyes were last
history
having taught the
Rapanui
enlightenment
comes after
the
deaf and blind
insurrections of fate.
Slowly, gradually, comes healing after trauma and illness. Johnson has
a tremendous capacity to relive traditional myths and stories, and to
turn them around to her own concerns, as well as plundering other
literary texts, or photographs, using them as stylistic or narrative
springboards for her own poems. They quickly find their own energies
and drives, however: the postmodern poetics of reflection and
self-reflection, and the forces of cultural appropriation are always
harnessed in ways that let new voices speak. In ‘The
Greenest Island’,
Johnson starts with Paul Theroux’s story of the same name,
but spins a
reflection on the possibility of re-reading and rewriting this story
that gradually gives way to the experiences of its own fiction. In the
second part of this poem, the tragic female victim, the poor, hungry,
abandoned pregnant wife of the first part, gives way to a complacent
modem young woman walking along the beach, not seeing the fish stranded
on the sand, ‘rolling
in the jewel-studded petticoat of an exposed
tide’.
I could tell you the fish has his eyes, but the words would have
no
meaning,
You have forgotten the story
you read long ago; the story
where
his eyes
were not mentioned. You have
forgotten what he has done, or
you
have
never
known because it
has not happened to you. So, there is
no
parable
nor the selective secrets of
dramatic irony. There is only the
fish
drowning
at
the water’s edge; and
the flat-bellied woman who walks the
beach
alone,
never dreaming of babies. And
the sea, that when the wind
stabs
it in a certain way
has
been known to sound
like the squawking of chickens.
I described Johnson’s poetry as global, in terms of its
international
reference and reach, but it is also global, more literally, in that she
has this capacity to see things all the way around, to make things
anew, to sing new songs. The book is also beautifully produced and
edited. Like all Black Pepper books it is a delight to hold and read,
from its elegant cover to its perfect layout and design. Poetry is well
served by this book, both inside and out. The collection is called Nomadic, to
signify, I think, its
wandering eye for story, image and feeling, and so it seems appropriate
to give it an envoy. In the time-honoured way, then, we say ‘Go,
little
book’
and send you
out into the world on your travels. May they be long
and happy ones, and may you come home covered in glory.
Back to top