Review of Babylon in Friends Journal
Johnson’s poems are steeped in the past—in references biblical and historical, in places storied from ancient times—but their language and their perspective are deeply of our moment. They speak to a condition that is curiously new, yet the allusions to the Song of Simeon, Babylonian captivity, Gaza, and Jerusalem twist those things of old into even stranger and more distant ones. This dislocation can leave a kind of “lead taste” in one’s mouth, or soul for that matter, as Johnson puts it in the final poem of the book, “Question for an Exile,” making one feel “bitter,” scarred, and pierced. But that’s where we find ourselves in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, especially those of us who have nurtured a commitment to the spiritual life, even as its foundation seems to have swept out with the receding tide. -James W. Hood
Read the full review by James W. Hood in the Friends Journal.
Rembrandt’s Etchings at the Worcester Art Museum
Dutch artist Rembrandt van Rijn 1606-1699 created over 300 etchings. He depicted biblical images, landscapes and scenes of daily life, and studies of faces.
The Diameter of the Bomb by Yehuda Amichai
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making a circle with no end and no God.
Yehuda Amichai 1924-2000
I Am Learning to Abandon the World by Linda Pastan d. 2023
as if to make amends.
Linda Pastan, “I Am Learning to Abandon the World” from PM/AM: New and Selected Poems (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1982
In Memory of Shane MacGowan, d. November, 2023
Dirty Old Town was written about Salford in North West England. It is a song of affection, roughed up by the Pogues, for small towns. A rerun of the performance.
I lost a world the other day -Emily Dickinson
I lost a World – the other day!
Has Anybody found?
You’ll know it by the Row of Stars
Around its forehead bound.
A Rich man—might not notice it—
Yet—to my frugal Eye,
Of more Esteem than Ducats—
Oh find it—Sir—for me!
A Single Autumn by W. S. Merwin
The year my parents died
one that summer one that fall
three months and three days apart
I moved into the house
where they had lived their last years
it had never been theirs
and was still theirs in that way
for a while
echoes in every room
without a sound
all the things that we
had never been able to say
I could not remember
doll collection
in a china cabinet
plates stacked on shelves
lace on drop-leaf tables
a dried branch of bittersweet
before a hall mirror
were all planning to wait
the glass doors of the house
remained closed
the days had turned cold
and out in the tall hickories
the blaze of autumn had begun
on its own
I could do anything
W. S. Merwin
Babylon
The title poem from my new collection momentarily separates private heartbreak from geopolitical, ethnic, national or communal suffering and from assertions of historical injustice.
Babylon
There is more than enough sadnessto go around, so some of us get upand gather fuel for funeral fireswe stoke up and down the river banks.In copper and wicker, we haul grayash for scrubbing earthen cookwareand cleansing our immortal souls.Others, with a gift for it, rehearsesilence they feel beneath the sand,under pastures and vineyards, aboveearth’s jumble and tin, rhythmsrebounding off the skin of a drum,rippling to flood desert wadis and soakthe crevices of our human brains.Eyes averted, heads bowed, handsclasped behind their backs, they followthe clop and ruffle of military paradesand holiday advancements, as otherspatrol the valley floors, examinedimpled shadows cast by foreignmountains that rise, tilt, and slide aside.
Babylon: A New Collection of Poems
Jeffrey Johnson’s Babylon casts upon the world
the kind of compassionate attention that can raise the
sensual to the level of the spiritual, the transcendent.
What a pleasure to watch this magical transformation
happen in poem after luminous poem.
Jay Hopler
author of The Abridged History of Rainfall
This collection impresses as much by its range as by
its many other undeniable virtues. There are poems of
historical enactment beside moments of particularized
tenderness. Throughout, the poems present a vision
that may be called religious but one so transcendent
as to make even that noble word feel reductive.
Sydney Lea
Vermont Poet Laureate, 2011–2015
Jeffrey Johnson’s poems come to us full of wonder
and amazement. Peopled by Perry Como, Jesse James,
Thomas Merton, and by boys in Tanzania hamming it up
for the camera, they travel the world with open hands
and hearts. Johnson writes, “If a plow is placed before
your eyes, / step up to that plow.” He steps up to the
plow that is poetry, and what a harvest he brings us!
Athena Kildegaard
author of Courses
My new book of poems, titled Babylon, will be available from Fernwood Press in a few weeks.
For the Boys of Gaza
This poem is from my new collection, Babylon. The poem was written and revised over many years, long before the heartbreak of today’s news.
For the Boys of Gaza
Tire smoke and tear gas
incense your faces
and infect your breath
when you rise together
as blood brothers,
boiling from damp alleys
where defiance seeps
through unscheduled days,
hydrating your brains
enough to sprout an idea
for employment: why not
harvest fist-size desert fruit,
whip them one by one
at foreign windshields
and door panels?
When hours of rest fall,
blood smears your fingers
and dries on your bony wrists.
Pain settles with sacrifices
poverty has forced on you,
as the blushing sun buries
its face in the softness
of the hills and hides
in the lap of the mindful sea.
Harbors of Heaven 