Jim Johnstone, Infinity Network

 

Two Sleep Through

the night, the lowering
balloon that stills
the chop and spill
of the lake, one awake,
or awake enough
in dream to follow
the stink of a fox
through the trees,
two asleep where the last
of a bonfire burns
the beach, balloons
into thought
without articulation,
without speech,
one awake, brightening
behind the bathroom
door while the other
waits, listens to the tap
foam foam foaming
at the mouth, white noise
drowning out the fox,
the fire, the balloon
inflating until it pops.

Toronto poet, editor and publisher Jim Johnstone’s sixth full-length poetry title is Infinity Network (Montreal QC: Signal Editions/Vehicule Press, 2022), a book that works to articulate elements of violence that ripple beneath the skin of culture; the ways in which infinity turns on itself and consumes its own tail, writing the ouroboros of deleted scenes, dehumanizing corporate culture and the echo chambers of social media, amid strains of isolation, self-harm and truthiness. “The problem is permission,” he writes, to open the poem “Trompe L’Oeil,” “and I told you / I don’t like to be touched. // The problem is / self-harm— // knuckles aligned to read: / HATE / LOVE.”

There are ways in which I hear echoes of Halifax poet Matt Robinson’s work [see my review of his latest here] in Johnstone’s poems, as though the two are sides of a similar coin, akin to a period of the 1960s, when John Newlove and Patrick Lane were crafting lyrics that held similar counter-echoes—a roughneck, intellectual lyric that saw Newlove leaning further into the intellectual, and Lane leaning further into the roughneck, and the conversational. Both Johnstone and Robinson, it would appear, craft portraits of inhabited space—of communal, community and individual narratives—carving their individual poems articulating intimate thinking, cultural moods and dark impulses. Leaning more meditational than Robinson’s physicality, Johnstone offers a collection of poems on how we relate to each other. “If you cut / through my line of sight,” he writes, as part of “Speaking Distance,” a poem subtitled “Queen’s Park, Toronto,” “the pages between us will fall / like artillery, like the spears that frame the southern wall / of the Assembly.”

There are long threads being composed by Johnstone through this collection, with his individual pieces and longer stretches feeling akin to a narrative shorthand, able to see the trees for the forest, but also the larger picture of how each of these different elements cohere into something larger, connecting the world to all that live within it. “Sober again. Don’t listen to me,” he writes, as part of the fifth in the ten-poem sequence “Deleted Scenes,” “in this state. // Conscious enough to develop / fever, blister from sheer depravity.” He writes as a pragmatist, or even an optimist, but one who aims to shine a light in dark places. Or, as he writes to end the poem “Identity as a Wormhole in a Hotel Window,” “One day everyone / who rents a room in this town will be different.”