Mike Johnson: Selected Poems (2023)

Design: Daniela Gast & Rowan Johnson

Mike Johnson. Selected Poems 1977-2022. Edited by Jack Ross. ISBN 978-1-991083-00-5. 99% Press. Auckland: Lasavia Publishing Ltd., 2023. 206 pp.

Contents:

Introduction

from The Palanquin Ropes (1983)


1. sparrow of ashes
2. salmon leap, buck
3. I’ve never had a chipped bowl
4. branch, bare dawn
5. delved into religions
6. the poet asks
7. much time spent afraid
8. wind through my hands

from From a Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons (1984)


9. feeling at home
10. cinderella
11. doing a starfish
12. exercise four

from Standing Wave (1985)


13. street sign – Oneroa, Waiheke Island
14. a red paper fish
15. enough
16. I found the ten thousand lines missing
17. J was a captive of wonder. She travelled
18. I’m burying it
19. no change
20. you have to be able
21. all things come to rest
22. memory rock

from Span 23 (1986)


23. the children

from Treasure Hunt (1996)


24. 2 - Learning to read is like trying to walk on your hands –
25. 4 - Here there are signs which don’t so much exist
26. 5 – If the telephone rings, don’t answer
27. 7 – Be glad there’s still a morepork or two left
28. 10 - Look for this one in the most ordinary places
29. 11 – Go to the city if you have the gall
30. 13 – There are Clues that can be found
31. 17 – Certain things you will notice, little irrelevancies
32. 19 – The chase ends in the dissipation of moons –
33. Night of the blue moon a warm northerly rain comes down
34. They’ve all gone mad, love. There’s Nanu, ringing me up
35. On the day another Bosnian peace accord collapsed
36. Dark rain sweeps the valley at dawn
37. Seeing you after the play
38. The scoop of Palm Beach was dark as we walked
39. Watch us
40. She chops up her fingers on the chopping board
41. Winter Solstice
42. Skull has a resurrection, the kind known
43. When the man with the grey skin comes to your door
44. We huddle down behind the pews, pressing ourselves
45. Edicts have been issued, the guards doubled and queues are forming
46. I want to convey that quality of light that goes frail
47. Walking up through the section

from The Vertical Harp: Selected Poems of Li He (2006)


48. singing the blues on Mt Hua
49. curly beard
50. autumn on its way
51. incarceration
52. high mountain, goddess trails
53. cold canyons
54. found arrowhead
55. on the frontier

from To Beatrice Where We Crossed The Line (2014)


56. Soft Toy Goddess
57. Eyeglass in Gaza
58. After Alamu Prabhu
59. My Father was a Shoulder

from Two Lines and a Garden (2017)


60. after everything
61. for the fish, no notion of rain
62. mountain, beach, and valley, sky and stone

from Ladder With No Rungs (2019)


63. distance is measured in the body
64. she drew a line through her memory
65. tyres crunch on gravel
66. words, can’t be located
67. between the uprights and the

from Raising Light Trilogy (2020):

1 - The Toy Box


68. a house with no windows
69. Scheherazade: a still life
70. Noddy – a short story
71. Goldilocks the refugee
72. where it goes, nobody knows
73. you can’t say we didn’t get fair warning
74. the map is not the territory
75. we have these things
76. cowboy capers
77. memories of an arrow

2 - Hide Your Eyes: The Rumi Poems


78. that greater frenzy
79. see-saw
80. most gentle revenge
81. cultivation
82. the Beloved rules
83. the gardenia
84. the wooden spoon
85. sensual senses
86. cutting up shadows into syllables
87. the empty boat

3 - Extinction Rebellion: A Tribute


88. the intention
89. as we lived
90. soft bandage
91. the same world
92. no longer the sun
93. stealing flowers
94. the book
95. not as dead
96. this is where I died
97. the houses of sleep

from Flippity Fluppity Flop (2021)


98. One little match-head
99. Bugle call
100. Poems
101. Before
102. Run, run, run
103. My Mummy

from Sketches (2023)


104. labyrinth
105. Coromandel wake up
106. bird sketches
107. the power of the eagle
108. Whakanewha sunrise
109. Putiki Point
110. beach walk
111. movement
112. Palm Beach in the age of Covid 19
113. Thompson’s Point
114. From the slopes of Ruapehu
115. passing through
116. a trick of the eye
117. at Auckland hospital
118. at Found – Surfdale
119. winter rain

Poetry Bibliography

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Mike Johnson

Available:

Lasavia Publishing
37 Crescent Rd West
Ostend
Waiheke Island
Auckland 1081
https://www.lasaviapublishing.com/

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Blurb:

A meaty and satisfying slection of the work of one of New Zealand's most preeminent and prolific poets, tracing the development of his work from the seventies to today

'Johnson is one of New Zealand's most acomplished and inventive writers, at one with the word, its power, its airy fitness and everyday solidities, its resourcefulness, its craft.'

- Siobhan Harvey, winner of the Kathleen Grattan
poetry award, 2019

'The immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday are at the heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visible world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches which surround him in his longtime home-base, Waiheke Island.'

- Jack Ross, editor of Poetry New Zealand (2014-2019)

'[Johnson finds] just the right formulation to deiver a descriptive vitalism that is open, alert, tentative, ambulatory, elegant, palpable.'

- David Eggleton, Poet Laureate, 2019-2022

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