The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New [Hardcover]

Denis Johnson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1995

From the award-winning poet and novelist—a must-have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Lately known more for his fiction (Jesus' Son, LJ 2/1/92), Johnson attracted attention in the 1980s for a poetry that depicted a disillusioned America driven to strangeness by media addiction and consumerism, a nation of "Face-owners... impossible to impress, dead inside,/ Looking for somebody they can trust again,/Someone to make them feel betrayed one more time." This awkwardly titled omnibus collects the author's four published poetry collections, adding 16 poems written since The Veil (LJ 7/87). Sleepwalking the same moonlit territory of self-negation and despair opened by Mark Strand three decades ago, Johnson tries to spike the bleakness with complex images ("All night the moon rings like a telephone/in an empty booth above our separateness") that often devolve into confused abstractions. Where the early work can seem too somber and self-pitying, and the later poems too smug in their formulas, "The Incognito Lounge" and several other pieces still impress with their spectral invention but not sufficiently so to support a retrospective of this size.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

After Mayakovsky
All-night Diners
April 20, 1969
The Basement
Behind Our House
Blessing
The Boarding
Boy Aged Six Remembering
The Cabinet Member
California
Checking The Traps
A Child Is Born In The Midwest
The Circle
The Coming Of Age
Commuting
The Confession Of St. Jim-ralph
A Consequence Of Gravity
Crossing Over The Ice
Crow
Drink
Driving Toward Winter
Drunk In The Depot
The Dry Dry Land. Here
Employment In The Small Bookstore
Enough
An Evening With The Evening
Falling
Feet
The Flames
For Jane
For The Death Of The Old Woman
From A Berkeley Notebook
The Glimpsed Old Woman In The Supermarket
Gray Day In Miami
Grocery On Venice Beach
Heat
The Heavens
The Honor
In A Light Of Other Lives
In A Rented Room
In Praise Of Distances
The Incognito Lounge
An Inner Weather
Iowa City
Killed In The War I Didn't Go To
Looking Out The Window Poem
The Man Among The Seals
The Man Who Was Killed
Minutes
The Monk's Insomnia
The Mourning In The Hallway
Movie Within A Movie
Night
Now
Nude
Ocean And Wilshire
On A Busy Street A Man Walks Behind A Woman
On The Morning Of A Wedding
On The Olympic Peninsula
Orchard
The Other Age
Our Sadness
Out There Where The Morning
Palo Alto
Passengers
The Past
Poem
Poem
A Poem About Baseballs
Poem Questioning The Existence Of The Sea
Prayer: That We May Be Given This Day The Usual Business
The Prayers Of The Insane
Proposal
Quickly Aging Here
Radio
Red Darkness
Retirement
The Risen
The Rockefeller Collection Of Primitive Art
A Saint
The Skewbald Horse
Someone They Aren't
Sonnets Called On The Sacredness
Spaceman Tom And Commander Joe
The Spectacle
Spring
The Story
Street Scene
Students
The Supermarkets Of Los Angeles
Surreptitious Kissing
Survivors
Sway
Talking Richard Wilson Blues, By Richard Clay Wilson
Telling The Hour
Ten Months After Turning Thirty
There Are Trains Which Will Not Be Missed
This Is Thursday. Your Exam Was Tuesday.
Throne Of Third Heaven Of Nations Millennium Gen. Assembly
To Enter Again
Tomorrow
Traveling
The Two
Ulysses
Upon Waking
The Veil
Vespers
Victory
Visits
What This Window Opens On
Where The Failed Gods Are Drinking
The White Fires Of Venus
White, White Collars
Why I Might Go To The Next Football Game
Willits, California
Winter
A Woman
The Woman At The Slot Machine
The Woman In The Moon
A Woman Is Walking Alone Late At Night
The Words Of A Toast
Working Outside At Night
The Year's First Snow
You
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Harpercollins; 1st edition (April 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060171804
• ISBN-13: 978-0060171803
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,454,960 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Will the Poet Come Home?, November 16, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (Paperback)

Doubtless, Denis Johnson is an extraordinary writer of fiction: his stories and novels are terrifying, delightful, hilarious, and bleak. But it remains, even in the prose, the quality of the language, the strange otherworldly perceptions he distills to image and figure, that drives the work. JESUS' SON is a great work, as is ANGELS. The other novels and stories would be enough to give him a reputation as a first rate writer. But the poems! That's where he started, and if you want to see how he got where fiction has taken him, go to the poems. It's not like any other poetry. He's a kind of dark, dwarf Rilke, a kind of misbegotten, doesn't-want-to-be-bad-but-can't-help-it Neruda. Denis Johnson is not the sort of poet the Academy of American Poets will celebrate, and that says far more about the Academy than about Johnson. What I wish? Another collection of poems. Soon.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major collection, March 20, 1999

By 

larry w. johnson - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (Paperback)

Denis Johnson's collection revives his long out-of-print "Man Among the Seals" and continues Johnson's life-long look at America's disenfranchised and marginalized. These poems have all kinds of surprises, both in subject matter and uses of language. Well worth buying, if you're interested in contemporary poetry.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing poetry, November 23, 2008

By 

Brian Hullfish (Toosawn, AZ) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New (Hardcover)

I love this collection so much I put one of the poems (The Flames) on my ceiling in black marker so I could read it before going to sleep.