Departures by Allan Johnston

Johnston’s intimate knowledge of Pacific Coast L. A. suburb lifeways comes alive anew in an old language — dry and elegant literary English — even as the ever-present ocean washes over it all. “We children” troop through the bedrooms and classrooms of the past. These poems chart how we left that (personal) past behind. A strange and moving gathering of poems.
–Gary Snyder

Leaving childhood is leaving more than one landscape, is leaving the “chameleon ocean”, the yarrow and sagebrush; the “land of a thousand faces” where children carved “demons, pirates, clowns, the sphinxes and strange arabesques until the silt seemed to pack in kinship”; the grandmother, pale as the small ghost housed in the cameo egg at her throat who would speak… of the dreams of the world we’re leaving.” In a language of love reminiscent of Proust, Allan Johnston takes us into a life on the Pacific’s shores– “Livorno, high in the child’s eye:/sunlight, pink brick, honey-colored stucco”– the magnetism and the danger: “we moved there from where the cliff dropped suddenly….” The cliff, the ocean, the tree, all fall through dream light, they fall. “When evening approached, waving flags of surrender,/ we grew up and left,/ yet still the sea/ surrenders its life up to a sun/ that boils each heaven to a bone.” Hypnotic, breathtaking descriptions take the reader into landscapes of the land and the heart both, the “eating ocean”, departure, “the continuous music of its washing/ as wave hits shore and pylon,/ carrying all with its incessant beat: wave, wave wave.”
–Helen Degen Cohen

In these poems of remembering past places and recovering the ways the world once felt, Allan Johnston shows that forgotten and half-remembered moments of departure can crumble away like an ocean-gnawed cliff, then rise as if “the moon rid[ing] high/On its laugh of light. These departures are moments deep arrival—moments of luminous consciousness mottled on the real, lichen on the rocks.
–Tim Hunt

Allan Johnston cuts to the inner essence of memory, primal and elegant – not only of people, but also places diminished “in small denominations” by human intervention and time. His is an authentic voice, quietly insistent and austere, whether exploring the elusive beauty of a color-shifting octopus and a sea creature’s hard shell house remembered from his California coastal home, or his childhood knowledge of death limited to a found robin’s egg. With its rippled tidal waters, dragonflies and cattails, Departures recalls a past that resonates powerfully, part of the present.
–Whitney Scott, Editor, Black-and-White anthology series, Outrider Press

Rating: [5 of 5 Stars!]