Bøger af Gordon Johnston

"In the title poem of Gordon Johnston's second collection, a canoer with his keel in a quick current is too caught up in the flow of water, sunlight, and sycamore leaves to say precisely where he is on the river. He is constantly both arriving and departing, negotiating his passage through a riverscape that is as ancient as it is newborn, that is mapped and familiar but always in flux. These poems engage the losses and renewals of this flux--encounters with the "trash fish," turtles, otters, and other lives in Southern rivers and woods as well as in the wilds of West Virginia, Wyoming, and Oklahoma. In these poems, mountains, plains, and creeks--even clay, birch bark, and shelf lichens--speak. "Where Here Is Hard to Say" also applies in this collection to crossing into new, difficult human territories, "Lonely Middles" of confronting the mortality of friends and parents, letting sons and daughters grow up and away from the home, wrestling with depression, and trying to find stable footing in mid-life as the ecstatic alternates with the awful. The poems invent prayers and weapons against the doubts. Telling stories, writing letters, cutting back brush, carving canoes, listening to Wilco, the poems find fellowship in each of these acts. By turns wryly funny, rueful, awed, and nostalgic, the voice in these poems may have trouble saying exactly where it is, but it makes the reader glad to be there, too, listening. There is a hard-won wisdom in these poems, but they are never didactic or preachy. They express their insights through humble, often funny, speakers and through precise images that honor the mysteries of faith and experience. This is a book with stories to tell, visions to impart, and music to convey them memorably."--Publisher's website.

"A middle-aged woman who has lost her father and the pawn shop she inherited from him kayaks a wild Seven Islands rapid, looking for solace or self-destruction - an orphaned boy finds purpose and a path toward self-definition through borrowed Native culture and gar-fishing -- the river baptism of a scarred, violent man tamed by a stroke revives a congregation even as it reopens old wounds - a long-exiled, past-her-prime call girl returns to Macon, Georgia to uncover, thanks to an old house on the levee and a sandbar and a college art class, a surprising sense of belonging - Towaliga River memories carry a Navy sniper through his grim wartime duty... These seven stories, written after their author canoed the Ocmulgee and its tributaries, draw on European-American, Native, and African-American traditions and relationships with the upper river between the confluence of the Yellow, Alcovy, and South rivers under Jackson Lake and Macon. Set from the 1810s to the present, the stories follow characters as their inherited or adopted perspectives on the river - and their ignorances of it - are altered by their personal experience of the watershed's danger, power, and life. Each story engages a specific place, among them Pittman's Ferry, the Seven Islands, Smith Shoals, the levee in Macon, and the Ocmulgee Mounds of the Mississippian people"--

Durable Goods, poem by poem, finds lasting value in ordinary daily acts and objects -- shaving with an inherited safety razor, packing a backpack for a wilderness trek, listening to Neal Young on a cassette worn to the brink of uselessness, answering a toddler daughter's questions about air. There are letter poems to writer friends composed along trails in the Rockies, appreciations of the crooked, eternally unraveling beauties of river rapids and of the canoes that cooperate with them. By turns boyish and battle-scarred -- "For forty years," one poems says, "I have been fifteen" -- the voice is this collection is that of a man listening to his life, leaning toward whatever durable good he can come across next.

An exploration of the hinterland between the havens of faith and the rough terrain of doubt.

This book is the first full-length history of the BBC World Service: from its interwar launch as short-wave radio broadcasts for the British Empire, to its twenty-first-century incarnation as the multi-media global platform of the British Broadcasting Corporation.