Jim Johnstone, The King of Terrors

 

KRAKEN

Slip of the tongue, slipof the sea’s
eight arms, and the whirlpoolbegins
to compress its armour:
failed spears, failedreel, a lens
to enlarge the pericardialinferno
thrashing like an ocean
of downturned blades; andthe criss-
crossing above, far fromthe eroding
waves mapping the shore,a swell
of limbs reaches out toswallow
all that ruptures thesurface
with the self-same inkand afterglow
that drew Montfort to mime
the wine-dark whine ofthe unseen.

I’mslowly working my way through Toronto poet Jim Johnstone’s seventh full-lengthpoetry title, The King of Terrors (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023),following Infinity Network (Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], and this new collection is composed “after a braintumour diagnosis,” as the back cover informs, as “a treatise on living withillness and the way that language, relationships, and our immersion in thenatural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse.” Despite the unexpectedand sudden diagnosis, the poems themselves continue a trajectory of approachfrom his prior collection, offering a wistful and examining commentary on theviolence that exists just below the surface of the skin, whether through largerculture, or quite literally. “From the foot of the bed / only those mistakenfor a storm can stay: // those dreaming / the cyclone’s whip,” he writes, toopen the poem “HAUNTOLOGY.” He writes of impending collapse, even as he writesfrom the perspective of someone deeply grateful, even surprised, to still behere, and his poems offer both a perspective on the immediate moment and thepossibility, and the dread, of that further horizon. “I’m not scared. I’veheard / talk of my condition before – / the times my father would say / it’snot brain surgery, son, / meaning this isn’t life or death / and you haveheard before / you’ll count backwards / from thirty,” he writes, to open the fifthpoem in the eight-poem sequence “THERE IS NOTHING MORE INVASIVE THAN SNOW,” “fightbut fall under / the spell [headache] of sleep, / snow’s all-encompassing /grip.”

Thereis something very precise in the lyrics of Jim Johnstone, akin to sketchworks:sketched for the sake of quick study, but one with the precision of SylviaLegris [see my review of her latest here] or Da Vinci, sketching withexploratory purpose, and the simultaneous ability to capture and reveal. “Iknow better.” he writes, to close the third poem in the five-poem sequence “WILLWORK FOR BLOOD,” “To cure the ‘insane,’ / settlers built a factory with a clear/ view of the lake – public gardens / fixed in place, fossils framing / thebiosphere. The break in the brick / the only thing that keeps us here.”