Here and Gone: New & Selected Poems by Don Johnson
– available at Polar Peek Books & Treasures in Fernie
– Reviewed by Angie Abdou for The Fernie Fix’s November 2010 Issue

I meant to recommend Here and Gone for its vivid and moving depictions of fishing. Poems about fly-fishing, thought I, this book is made for Fernie readers! But when I sat down to write my column, I found myself consumed, instead, with thoughts of death. Death and life are everywhere in these poems, which shouldn’t be a surprise: poems are always about life and death. However, I’ve never seen the two placed so starkly together. In poems absolutely teeming with life, the presence of death is, every time, uncomfortable and startling. 

I don’t know why death should continue to catch me off guard.  You’d think after the first few poems, I’d figure out what Johnson is doing, and I’d be ready for it.  But Johnson is tricky – again and again he lulls me into a comfortable sense of security.  Again and again, I’m shocked by the brass intrusion of death. I bang full-force into it in each poem: Death?!  Who left death lying here? Right in the way! The ease with which Johnson continually moves so seamlessly from life to the death does something deep in the pit of my stomach. At each conclusion, I’m left—to use Johnson’s own words—“with the room turning around me, not in dream, nor metaphor, but spinning, really spinning.”

But let’s talk about fishing.  Fishing is a nice, comfortable, pleasant topic. I could tell you about the poem featuring a white-nymph fly tied with the hair of the poet’s dog, a dog that’s been dead for four years. I could explain how the poet dug the grave while the pet, still alive, “watched/ half-blind and deaf, nosing the slick clods/ until the clay stained her muzzle rusty.” I could tell you how the poet, recalling his dog’s grave, fishes, following his nymph downstream “to where the river braids,/ spills to one sound/ and disappears in the shadows.” I could quote the conclusion of the poem that goes like this: “My backcast,/ collapsing in tired loops,/ threatens to bury my hook/ past the barb in the/ loose graying folds of my neck.”

But we were talking about fishing, not death, weren’t we? Sorry. Maybe I could tell you instead about the river as a cleansing force, a source of baptism. 

But In Johnson’s poems, the river’s baptism is not “like a bath/ in a wash basin.”  Instead the one awaiting baptism knows: “But the river would jerk/ out the sinner inside me, tumble it/ downstream like a skinned mink/ to the pool where the unclaimed drowned/ eddy forever.”

Not exactly a reassuring maternal force, is it? This poem concludes: “At night I lay beneath/ the tin roof’s griddle listening./ The river flexed its cold, angelic arms./ If I waited too long, like my daddy,/ they would reach over the bank willows/ into our swept yard and take me.”

So, you see how it goes, but to really feel the power of each of these poems, you will need to read them on your own. I heartily recommend Here and Gone to anyone who loves fly-fishing, to anyone who has ever stood in awe of the power and beauty of a river, and to anyone who might one day die.