by Gordon Johnston (Author)
In the title poem of Gordon Johnston's second collection, a canoer with his keel in a quick current is too caught up in the flow of water, sunlight, and sycamore leaves to say precisely where he is on the river. He is constantly both arriving and departing, negotiating his passage through a riverscape that is as ancient as it is newborn, that is mapped and familiar but always in flux. These poems engage the losses and renewals of this flux in Southern rivers and woods as well as in the wilds of West Virginia, Wyoming, and Oklahoma."Lonely Middles" confronts the mortality of friends and parents, letting sons and daughters grow up, wrestling with depression, and trying to find stable footing in mid-life as the ecstatic alternates with the awful. Telling stories, writing letters, cutting back brush, carving canoes, listening to Wilco, these poems find fellowship in each of these acts. By turns wryly funny, rueful, awed, and nostalgic, these poems make the reader glad to be there.