In the Land We Imagined Ourselves (Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series)
Panoramic in sweep and tender in spirit, these poems whirl us across many American landscapes and zoom us into many lives—from Wyatt Earp’s wife’s to that of a grieving son. Johnson is a generous pathologist of the human heart who is careful to leave its mystery intact.From the capital I of fenceposts to articulate cragsand the bird-like swoops of human talk, I love theintelligent landscape this poet invents and perpetuates just ahead, as if from a car eternally heading west. Like Hugo’s Marginal Way, Jonathan Johnson’s Upper Peninsula, his Idaho and Montana and Washington are really a brimming interior life, and these poems so often descriptive of motion and traveling enact the irresistible turns of a mind ever lively and shimmering.