Radi Os [Paperback]

Ronald Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2005

Poetry. First published in 1977, Ronald Johnson's RADI OS revises the first four books of Paradise Lost by excising words, discovering a modern and visionary poem within the seventeenth-century text. As the author explains, "To etch is 'to cut away,' and each page, as in Blake's concept of a book, is a single picture." With God and Satan crossed out, RADI OS reduces Milton's Baroque poem to elemental forces. In this retelling of the Fall, song precipitates from chaos, sight from fire: "in the shape / as of / above the / rose / through / rose / rising / the radiant sun."

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

In his afterword, Guy Davenport comments: "Radi os is a meditation, first of all, on grace. It finds in Milton's poems those clusters of words which were originally a molecular intuition of the complex harmony of nature whereby eyesight loops back to its source in the sun, the earth, the tree, our cousin animals, the spiralling galaxies, and mysteriously to the inhuman black of empty space."

Product Details

• Paperback: 107 pages
• Publisher: Flood Editions; First Edition edition (April 30, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0974690244
• ISBN-13: 978-0974690247
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #347,546 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wouldn't Miss it for the World, July 13, 2005

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Thomas Quale (Centerville, OH USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Radi Os (Paperback)

A wonderful work, full of felicities and beauty. Johnson's concept is marvelous, the flow and spatial quality of it a joy. I can see how he thought of it as kind of a geodesic dome--a good deal of space enclosed within a structure spare in its use of materials. The Flood edition is characteristically impeccable: a beauty of a book.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The divine fire of human Creation, September 21, 2009

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William Timothy Lukeman - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Radi Os (Paperback)

What poet Ronald Johnson has done here seems so simple ... but it takes a truly gifted poet to create such a work. Using William Blake's idea of etching, or cutting away, he's gone through the first four books of Milton's epic poem "Paradise Lost," removing all but a few carefully chosen words & phrases from each page. What's revealed in the suddenly open space is a new poem of Creation, one of Song, Art, and primal forces from the soul & psyche of humanity.

This would be difficult enough to do with just a single page, creating one new short poem; but Johnson has in fact made a new epic, a continuing poem, one that startles & delights with its unexpected conjoinings of unrelated words, and yields dazzling new images. This is the sort of work that invites the reader to pause & contemplate each page, and fill in the white space with his or her own thoughts & emotions. Additionally, it'll make the reader look at language anew, and marvel at its beauty, its precision, and its enormous flexibility. It'll make you savor words again -- most highly recommended!

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A poem inside a poem, December 21, 2008

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José Parra "Durgá" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Radi Os (Paperback)

The great American poet Ronald Johnson decided to dig into John Milton's Paradise Lost in order to find a new poem, cooking new food for thought having to do with originality and authorship, taking into account that the words are originally Milton's. The reason for choosing this poem rather than others is to be found by each of you by scrutinazing even the empty prominence of the space inside the page, which the poem hardly touches.