Jim Johnstone, The King of Terrors

 

KRAKEN

Slip of the tongue, slip of the sea’s
eight arms, and the whirlpool begins
to compress its armour:
failed spears, failed reel, a lens
to enlarge the pericardial inferno
thrashing like an ocean
of downturned blades; and the criss-
crossing above, far from the eroding
waves mapping the shore, a swell
of limbs reaches out to swallow
all that ruptures the surface
with the self-same ink and afterglow
that drew Montfort to mime
the wine-dark whine of the unseen.

I’m slowly working my way through Toronto poet Jim Johnstone’s seventh full-length poetry title, The King of Terrors (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2023), following Infinity Network (Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2022) [see my review of such here], and this new collection is composed “after a brain tumour diagnosis,” as the back cover informs, as “a treatise on living with illness and the way that language, relationships, and our immersion in the natural world can free us from the spectre of impending collapse.” Despite the unexpected and sudden diagnosis, the poems themselves continue a trajectory of approach from his prior collection, offering a wistful and examining commentary on the violence that exists just below the surface of the skin, whether through larger culture, or quite literally. “From the foot of the bed / only those mistaken for a storm can stay: // those dreaming / the cyclone’s whip,” he writes, to open the poem “HAUNTOLOGY.” He writes of impending collapse, even as he writes from the perspective of someone deeply grateful, even surprised, to still be here, and his poems offer both a perspective on the immediate moment and the possibility, and the dread, of that further horizon. “I’m not scared. I’ve heard / talk of my condition before – / the times my father would say / it’s not brain surgery, son, / meaning this isn’t life or death / and you have heard before / you’ll count backwards / from thirty,” he writes, to open the fifth poem in the eight-poem sequence “THERE IS NOTHING MORE INVASIVE THAN SNOW,” “fight but fall under / the spell [headache] of sleep, / snow’s all-encompassing / grip.”

There is something very precise in the lyrics of Jim Johnstone, akin to sketchworks: sketched for the sake of quick study, but one with the precision of Sylvia Legris [see my review of her latest here] or Da Vinci, sketching with exploratory purpose, and the simultaneous ability to capture and reveal. “I know better.” he writes, to close the third poem in the five-poem sequence “WILL WORK FOR BLOOD,” “To cure the ‘insane,’ / settlers built a factory with a clear / view of the lake – public gardens / fixed in place, fossils framing / the biosphere. The break in the brick / the only thing that keeps us here.”