Sarah Johnson’s exciting first collection, Personae, traveled halfway around the world before it landed in my welcoming hands. Johnson lectures at the University of Cape Town in South Africa; her collection was published in the university’s Younger Poets Series.
This is truly a collection of distinctive voices – some historical, some contemporary – hence, the apt title. The first poem of the collection, "Ham," blew the top of my head off as Emily Dickinson would say. It is in the voice of one of Noah’s sons, as he emerges from the ark after the flood waters have subsided. For a poet in her early 20s, Johnson displays a mature sense of pacing and an insightful imagination:
Why does the world not fall away
in the face of its own
God-given meaninglessness,
not part its turmoil and open the way
to meaning, to dry land? Instead
it leans in, intensifies,
sings its own futility
in sharp sunlight. And steals from me
every moment
the desire to understand anything
deemed meaningful.
Many of Johnson’s poems are written from the perspective of Biblical figures, including the nameless adulteress who is spared a stoning when Jesus rebukes the scribes and Pharisees who charge her.
Johnson also gives voice to contemporary themes in poems written in the second and third person. "Widower" is a moving poem that conveys deep emotions without straying into sentimentality:
Best, though, best
you remember her
descending:
what it was like to wake,
at no particular time,
bewildered by her hair
falling in delicate dark chaos
over your face, across your mouth,
as you gasped her scent,
swallowed night
and sleep.
Johnson’s poems are filled with a pursuit of truth and beauty through stories of many lives – connecting us, as readers, to history, to each other, and to ourselves.
64 pgs.
This is Johnson's first collection.
