Book Review: The Road to Happiness by Johnathon Williams
Johnathon Williams
Antilever, 2012. Poetry.
Review by Debrah Lechner
Debrah.Lechner@gmail.com
The theme of this volume of poetry is the road, though not necessarily the trip. It’s a trip anyway.
The movement is through Arkansas, but in the process it covers a much larger territory. Childhood, love, sex, hope, hopelessness, death. But not by turns. All at once.
It’s often dark on this road. The utterly striking poem “Camping in the Ouachita National Forest,” for example:
Midnight,
and my father's God can't see
in
the dark. Coyotes do unto others
by
the tinctures of blood, their panting
Like
the whispered chansons of saints.
nightcrawlers
know a kind of scripture,
driven
to air on the ballasting dew.
.
. .Pit stones carry their own commandments
read
nightly in the flame's clipped tongue.
I
recognize the language but not the words.
I
grew up in woods like these, but for years
could
not stand the sound of a summer night,
how
something as fragile as cricket's legs,
multiplied
like the seraphim, host upon host,
might
rattle the earth with their need.
The tone of Williams’ work is consistently reverential, sexual, rural and lost, mapped and immediate. Above all, the tone is confidential, so don’t be surprised when you meet a remark that reflects a little disappointment with life. From “Head of Household”:
CEO
of this nuclear unit, you must not let
your
particles drift. If divorce is fission,
marriage
is plutonium. Come. Sit down.
Warm
your hands by its constant decay.
You’ve had conversations like these before. Perhaps you’ve just never recognized their potential for iconography, as the possible inspiration for repousse on warm metal. This satisfying and pleasurable collection of poems will remind you of their meaning.