And Stood on Red Earth All a Round

Poetry. Includes a DVD of The Lard Book (filmed by Brian Catling). A compendium of texts, including Pelt, Haul Song, The Lard Book, Pine Apple and Show.

Nicholas Johnson's poetry is a driven music, a propelled set of contiguities across the page which disperse into shards of imagery, typography and handwritten interventions / manifestations. In such texts as Eel Earth and The Lard Book performative conditions of composure are foregrounded so that the reading is generated close to the production of the text, privy to its intermediate scrawls, erasures and signals. The results are simultaneously fragile and brutal, mustering and destructing the language as it is coaxed into its clandestine, finer threads.--Aaron Williamson

The startling language and strong lyric voice allure me into a territory without a map where horizons are shifting possibilities of heart and mind. Nicholas Johnson's is an original poetic practice, evidencing integrity thoughout, which draws me into something like the Surrealists' miroir du merveilleux, even into Victor Hugo's sense of the profound waves of the marvelous, where anyone courageous enough is caught and darkened. This poem, in which the poet is haulier, pulls with force, transports, calls up, shifts course, offers the short and long hauls of the distances in experience and of the experience of language taking place in order to sing them. Haul Song enacts an experience of the materiality of language, loose or freed from any transcendental resolution for the poet or the reader - emotionally exact, the language may collapse into its letters as in 'Eel Earth', to begin again. The narrative of this poem is extraordinary and radial in form, always diverging from a centre that is never still. Elements, such as wishes screams and candle&qout;, serve rather like the burdens of a song. Form here is careful and alive. ... Haul Song is also a love poem and, I think, a very fine one .... [it] joins with distinction the contemporary effort to relocate the high lyric voice--to bring it down to earth--to let the song have the notes and rhythms of our complex and marvelous lives.--Robin Blaser