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Far-Fetched: Poems
A new collection from one of contemporary American poetry's finest craftsmen
Through birdcalls and ancient songs, rain patter and a child's scribble, the poems in Far-Fetched "sound the empty space / to test how long / how far." They follow the contours of Appalachian hillsides, Missouri river bends, and remote Australian coastlines, tuning language to landscape. They register emotional life with great care; this is a work of fierce and delicate attention to the world. It is also poetry meant to be heard, alert to the pleasures of sound. As August Kleinzahler has observed, "In Devin Johnston's poetry every syllable is alive; the vowels and consonants combine to make a distinctive, lovely, austere music."
Through birdcalls and ancient songs, rain patter and a child's scribble, the poems in Far-Fetched "sound the empty space / to test how long / how far." They follow the contours of Appalachian hillsides, Missouri river bends, and remote Australian coastlines, tuning language to landscape. They register emotional life with great care; this is a work of fierce and delicate attention to the world. It is also poetry meant to be heard, alert to the pleasures of sound. As August Kleinzahler has observed, "In Devin Johnston's poetry every syllable is alive; the vowels and consonants combine to make a distinctive, lovely, austere music."
- GenresPoetry
96 pages, Hardcover
First published March 31, 2015
4 people are currently reading
181 people want to read
About the author
Devin Johnston
19 books14 followersBorn in Canton, New York, Devin Johnston grew up in Winston-Salem and received his PhD from the University of Chicago. He is the author of several collections of poetry, including Far-Fetched (2015), Sources (2008), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, Aversions (2004), and Telepathy (2001). His prose writing includes the critical study Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice (2002) and Creaturely and Other Essays (2009). A former poetry editor for the Chicago Review from 1995-2000, Johnston co-founded and co-edits Flood Editions with Michael O’Leary.
He lives in St. Louis and teaches at Saint Louis University.
He lives in St. Louis and teaches at Saint Louis University.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
April 19, 2019
I’m going to be completely honest, this is the first book of poetry I’ve read since high school. Also, since were being honest, I didn’t exactly understand a good portion of it. That being said, there were a few poems in here that I did understand and truly enjoyed. Johnston wove nature and everyday life together beautifully. I particularly enjoyed “Circle Line: London”, “Tempers”, “Two from Catullus” (see picture), “Fixed Interval”, and “Come and See”. I can only rate my own experience with this piece, not how a true poetry fanatic would possibly rate it so keep that in mind.
May 18, 2023
I’m inspired to read more poetry. “-the incidents of a life fanning out in a strange display.”
October 6, 2015
It takes nothing away from Johnston's superbly 18th Century ear, its rational intuitiveness, so evident in the early parts of this book, with its love of nonce-rhyme, vowel-leading and other devices, to wonder about the latter parts of the collection's urban pastoral, and the appeal it holds for him:
kids crowd the stoop
backs to a darkened house
so close to nothing
yet incurious
The speaker would prefer his children out in the street:
Passing our porch, a girl often
holds a drum against her stomach
as you might a covered dish
The image is lovely not just for its sound, but because it's infused with nostalgia.
One thinks of Olson complaining of Pound's infatuation with Jefferson, "that conception of the poet [the yeoman-poet] is 200 years out of date!" So when "a kestrel | races to meet its shadow," we linger within an otium, where the love of the death within the pride in the figure is a kind of sentimentality Olson concerned himself to evade.
I love the shape of anecdote in Johnston's poems, as in "Turned Loose"'s when the speaker "disregard[s] the impulse to be free of" his children, who cling to parents that have decided to make a cultural excursion of a Sunday. There's ethos in that. Johnston's eye for the dramatic clarity of it overcomes the speaker's privacy; the emotional contact it's making spills through its shape. Doing right is the emotional contour of the Jeffersonian pastoral, and tolerating all else, as when on an over-booked flight, the reticent speaker finds himself seated next to a self-dramatizing, hard-living physician who has a quivre-ful of birding lore to share with her bewildered seat-mate. The poet earns his way with us in his own little self-dramatizations, scattered throughout this very enjoyable collection.
kids crowd the stoop
backs to a darkened house
so close to nothing
yet incurious
The speaker would prefer his children out in the street:
Passing our porch, a girl often
holds a drum against her stomach
as you might a covered dish
The image is lovely not just for its sound, but because it's infused with nostalgia.
One thinks of Olson complaining of Pound's infatuation with Jefferson, "that conception of the poet [the yeoman-poet] is 200 years out of date!" So when "a kestrel | races to meet its shadow," we linger within an otium, where the love of the death within the pride in the figure is a kind of sentimentality Olson concerned himself to evade.
I love the shape of anecdote in Johnston's poems, as in "Turned Loose"'s when the speaker "disregard[s] the impulse to be free of" his children, who cling to parents that have decided to make a cultural excursion of a Sunday. There's ethos in that. Johnston's eye for the dramatic clarity of it overcomes the speaker's privacy; the emotional contact it's making spills through its shape. Doing right is the emotional contour of the Jeffersonian pastoral, and tolerating all else, as when on an over-booked flight, the reticent speaker finds himself seated next to a self-dramatizing, hard-living physician who has a quivre-ful of birding lore to share with her bewildered seat-mate. The poet earns his way with us in his own little self-dramatizations, scattered throughout this very enjoyable collection.
December 27, 2020
repeat re-read,
pearls of word now thread.
music embed
in visuals said,
imagination ripples spread...
a tone-deaf may be misled,
lest eyeing text being fed,
lost serenity jump ahead.
In dissonant one may tread,
slow to meditate what unsaid.
—————
Read multiple times, not only trying (fail) to decipher cleverly-coined words, but more for staying at nerve calming reverie.
Even I don't get 50% and miss the point, I could envision each ordinary object with interesting facets, violent strokes of drama melt to nonchalant smear. Eternal nature embrace all, boredom or excitement.
I'm "Owl-eyed"(p48).
pearls of word now thread.
music embed
in visuals said,
imagination ripples spread...
a tone-deaf may be misled,
lest eyeing text being fed,
lost serenity jump ahead.
In dissonant one may tread,
slow to meditate what unsaid.
—————
Read multiple times, not only trying (fail) to decipher cleverly-coined words, but more for staying at nerve calming reverie.
Even I don't get 50% and miss the point, I could envision each ordinary object with interesting facets, violent strokes of drama melt to nonchalant smear. Eternal nature embrace all, boredom or excitement.
I'm "Owl-eyed"(p48).
October 6, 2020
In my admittedly brief and untrained experience with poetry, what strikes me most about it is its ability to invite the reader in. When read carefully and deliberately, I feel as if I’m communing with the poet. Devin Johnston creates exactly this atmosphere. While reading these poems, I was at least seeing what Johnston is writing about, and at their best (some of my favorites were The Clyde, Geode, Circle Line: London, and Turned Loose), I felt like I was experiencing them.
July 31, 2015
This is the kind of poetry that makes me look up word meanings and pronunciations, words like "transumption" and "metonymical". And, like those words, I don't really grasp the meaning of many of these poems but I adore saying the words out loud. Many of these poems evoke such vivid imagery of mundane scenes like an afterschool afternoon and they do so beautifully.
August 9, 2015
My favorite poem was "Turned Loose".
October 21, 2016
An eclectic mixture of poems that embrace nature.
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Now I am passing it along to a library so others can enjoy.
I won this book in a Goodreads giveaway. Now I am passing it along to a library so others can enjoy.
January 19, 2018
Those ferns on the cover, deep shadows and saturated green — that’s what got me to pick this one up. I wanted to like this collection of nature-poetry much more than I actually did.
These poems are primarily descriptive — and therein might be what kept me from loving them. They’re not overly stocked with imagery, or even lengthy. They just detail things: often birds, or pastoral scenes. But at the end of the poem they usually just stay where they are on the page, without rising at all to take me into uncharted or unexpected territory.
One poem that veered from the theme was called Strangers. I appreciated its honesty, the way it pinned down the uncomfortable feeling of ending up on a plane next to someone who you think you’ll have little in common with. You make judgments quickly, but as it turns out, those reveal themselves as not at all correct. I was with Johnston for this poem until the line, presumptuous: “What would such scraps mean to her?” We go from the beginning of the poem with a haughty narrator-poet, skimming an Audubon guide, to a moment where the narrator bridges a gulf riven by class (an opportunity that planes often allow us) and sees this person who talks “too loudly on her phone” for more than what he thought she could be, back to a distance of criticism at the end. Perhaps this is the point of the poem — that our small class differences make us unreachable to so many others — but it felt like a misfire, and I was saddened by the opportunity squandered.
There are some good ones in here, though: the poem Turned Loose is a lovely piece on the contradictions of parenting, of wanting to be free of the children when you’re with them but pining for their presence as soon as you’re back at the work the following week. And then the final one, Satin Bowerbird, is a great one for anyone who knows birds — the miraculous quirks of the bowerbird, who gathers found objects and arranges them according to color, is a perfect topic for a poem. As it closed the collection, it was a nice poem to land on in the end.
These poems are primarily descriptive — and therein might be what kept me from loving them. They’re not overly stocked with imagery, or even lengthy. They just detail things: often birds, or pastoral scenes. But at the end of the poem they usually just stay where they are on the page, without rising at all to take me into uncharted or unexpected territory.
One poem that veered from the theme was called Strangers. I appreciated its honesty, the way it pinned down the uncomfortable feeling of ending up on a plane next to someone who you think you’ll have little in common with. You make judgments quickly, but as it turns out, those reveal themselves as not at all correct. I was with Johnston for this poem until the line, presumptuous: “What would such scraps mean to her?” We go from the beginning of the poem with a haughty narrator-poet, skimming an Audubon guide, to a moment where the narrator bridges a gulf riven by class (an opportunity that planes often allow us) and sees this person who talks “too loudly on her phone” for more than what he thought she could be, back to a distance of criticism at the end. Perhaps this is the point of the poem — that our small class differences make us unreachable to so many others — but it felt like a misfire, and I was saddened by the opportunity squandered.
There are some good ones in here, though: the poem Turned Loose is a lovely piece on the contradictions of parenting, of wanting to be free of the children when you’re with them but pining for their presence as soon as you’re back at the work the following week. And then the final one, Satin Bowerbird, is a great one for anyone who knows birds — the miraculous quirks of the bowerbird, who gathers found objects and arranges them according to color, is a perfect topic for a poem. As it closed the collection, it was a nice poem to land on in the end.
April 26, 2019
I'm new to poetry and, searching through book after book, I had a hard time finding a poem that I like. This book contains four that caught my fancy. My favorite poem is "Geode," and I memorized it on the spot. I also really like "Leaving Home."
February 27, 2020
Thoroughly enjoyable poems regarding the natural world, human interactions and ornithology. He would have had me at the ornithology. I also note that he is a local poet, although knowledge of my local region is hardly necessary to understanding the poetry, although it doesn't hurt.
September 6, 2021
Geode & Tempers were two of my favorite poems in this collection.
Read
February 9, 2024Dog-eared:
"Geode"
"New Song"
"Strangers"
"Geode"
"New Song"
"Strangers"
February 11, 2024
Pretty mid. One or two poems stuck out to me but overall it was like my eyes scanned over the words without taking in any meaning at all.
August 31, 2016
A giveaway win!
Admittedly some of these poems were way over my head...but the ones I understood are beautiful, especially the ones about parenthood.
Admittedly some of these poems were way over my head...but the ones I understood are beautiful, especially the ones about parenthood.
November 23, 2016
I won this book from Goodreads.
I didn't understand any of it.
I didn't understand any of it.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews