Roxane Beth Johnson's Jubilee
Jubilee by Roxane Beth Johnson (Anhinga Press, 2006)
How can one distinguish between authenticity and fakeness when the latter is shrewd enough to give the appearance of the former? There are no rules for this, and in the world of poetry, fakeness—that is, clever lines giving the semblance of depth, but which, in fact, are hollow; or, seemingly “poetic” structures, which are nothing but imitations of other poets—often rules and fools. So, I can’t tell you how I know that Roxane Beth Johnson is an authentic poet, but I know it.
After reading Jubilee, a collection of (mostly) prose poems, the reader is brimming with Johnson’s world—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, holy men and bums—and a certain religious feeling that can only come from the union of personal/familial history and the sacredness of a book (an “old black Bible”). “Religion” comes from the Lat. “religare,” i.e., to unite, to tie together, and Johnson’s religiosity is the kind that unites all the above into a whole carried under her skin. Even when she focuses on the formal aspect of a poem, there is something that transcends the surface. Listen to this:
“That old house arrives pure as tea having rinsed off its orchard and crawling vines. Windows are asterisks.”
Jubilee
How can one distinguish between authenticity and fakeness when the latter is shrewd enough to give the appearance of the former? There are no rules for this, and in the world of poetry, fakeness—that is, clever lines giving the semblance of depth, but which, in fact, are hollow; or, seemingly “poetic” structures, which are nothing but imitations of other poets—often rules and fools. So, I can’t tell you how I know that Roxane Beth Johnson is an authentic poet, but I know it.
After reading Jubilee, a collection of (mostly) prose poems, the reader is brimming with Johnson’s world—parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, holy men and bums—and a certain religious feeling that can only come from the union of personal/familial history and the sacredness of a book (an “old black Bible”). “Religion” comes from the Lat. “religare,” i.e., to unite, to tie together, and Johnson’s religiosity is the kind that unites all the above into a whole carried under her skin. Even when she focuses on the formal aspect of a poem, there is something that transcends the surface. Listen to this:
“That old house arrives pure as tea having rinsed off its orchard and crawling vines. Windows are asterisks.”
Jubilee
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Notes on Books
Book reviews and occasional notes and thoughts on world literature and writers by an American writer of Eastern European origin.
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