Devin Johnston: Aversions
(Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond, CA, 2004; paperback, 71pp, $14.95; isbn 1890650161)

According to the note at the back of the book, 'Aversions' are the rites the Romans performed in February each year to placate surrounding ghosts. The ghosts that Johnston seeks to propitiate in this excellent short volume originate not from the spirit world but a cerebral one, they originate from the forms or structures of thought employed to make sense of the material world we inhabit.

The quotation from Violette Leduc gives us an early clue: 'Nothing changes, everything is transformed.' And later on we have an echo of this from Johnston himself:

forms evolve
         to violate
                  every essence

(Ice)

The world we experience through the poetry is fragile and shifting, like smoke, it takes the form it does only as the mind brushes surfaces that surround it. Understanding is thus transient and incomplete; a shifting of mood, thought or expression and everything alters, the shapes never settle.

In 'Between Buildings' we experience directly the airiness of this process as the consciousness ebbs and flow over the surfaces of materiality:

Haunting this world.

By necessary law.

Some said hush.

Memory must be admitted.

Souls that drag a burden.

Tell all done and felt.

The very shade leans out.

(Between Buildings)

In section II of 'Phantom Dwelling' we see this same process at work, but in section III focus briefly shifts and we are presented for critical contrast with two animals, the poet's cats, whose instinctive certainty is at variance with his own. For them the natural world is apprehended and responded to without thought or recourse to the forms that deflect as they seek to create understanding. Here humans, despite their seeming advancement, remain tongue tied, as is indicated by the telephone 'refrain'.

In anticipation of the night
Mimi arches
                  against the screen
while Red circles the rug.

Light softens,
and the sky begins to snow;
lacquered larches click
against the glass.

Phone lines crackle,
breaking up
the slow refrain

I just don't know
I just don't know

(Phantom Dwelling)

And the final section of the same poem that begins by returning the reader to a world characterised as floating, mental ephemera:

Though living in my head
I would speak my mind –

my mind has changed/
I've changed my mind.

(Ibid.)

And concludes, echoing an earlier poem 'Dead', with the bathos of form as measurement, another device we use to appear to understand the essential world because it enables us to calculate, label and file away:

in back of which
amongst the trees

a sudden flock alights –
something to count on.

(Ibid.)

Lost in this world of forms objects and people can be perceived, analysed but never known:

The autumn sky has reasons
which reason does not know:

(White-out)

In 'The Very Thing', for example, labelling and taxonomy are shown to explain nothing to us and words, as formal building blocks, mislead, thus as a poet Johnston confronts both the futility of the language he is forced to work with as a means of explanation and the inevitability of its usage. The absurdity of his dilemma is being forced to work with a tool that in turn precedes and dominates experience and the expression of it:

Beneath a canopy of lime
which darkens the Daewoo's
windshield, we glide
through dictionaries
in search of mouflon.

One week married: if, then.
Wherever I start,
I'm lost to the language
and still putting pen to paper.

(Dark Wood)

But if forms and language will not give access to the essences which comprise the phenomenal world, emotion and instinct will and in the process connect us to the past, as Johnston points out in 'Early Spring' shaped after a poem by Horace. In it antiquity and modernity touch palms, it is only the forms that have altered, human nature remains unchanged. And in 'Los Angeles' where again past and present co-exist, the roots of one giving rise to the foliage of the other, but once more he reminds us of the old problem: that despite the leagues of fibre-optics, we have nothing to say:

Beneath the moon, emotions are
but vectors, dragging
                                    distant objects near.

As daikon sputters on an open flame,
the owner of Pagoda Inn
cradles the phone against
his shoulder. Neither party speaks,
yet leagues of fibre-optics lines
exchange their silences.

(Los Angeles)

Johnston displays an almost Eastern eye for connection and detail and an ability to perceive the complex in the simple. Regardless of the transformations, the material world remains for us to experience, if not to ultimately know:

The trees are bare
     of leaves and clothes
dissociate
     across the floor.

I take a card
     and recompose
myself from what
     we call "the world".

(March Air)

And in the collection's final poem:

Further out than we will go,
breakers squander, recompose,
time curls back on time.

(The Art of Autobiography)

The riddle of this poem's conclusion being the ultimate wisdom this work is created to encapsulate:

Explain to those who ask
how white was ever false
or how to mix
a perfect Whitely blue.

Then speak of things
that everybody knows.

(Ibid.)

Though carefully patterned, many of the poems are most rewardingly read as prose or spoken as everyday speech. For all their lightness and intangibility, they express an age-old problem in a modern voice – a version. They are the articulate creations of an intelligence engaging with the spectral forms that inhabit and comprise his modern world, so that his experiences of 'placation' may become ours through the ritual of verse.