Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

after reading his novel "Jesus' Son" the poetry comes as a big disappointment. abstract to the point of solipicism, emotionally numbing.