Lindsay Rabbitt
Selected Poems by Mike Johnson (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 208pp, $34.99; Sketches: Poems and drawings by Mike Johnson with artwork by Leila Lees (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 172pp, $21.99; Afterworld by Mike Johnson (Lasavia Publishing, 2023), 74 pp, $19.99
In the foyer of the Waiheke Island Library there’s a table laden with Mike Johnson’s substantial body of work: 10 novels, two books of short fiction, 12 volumes of poetry, a book of non-fiction and four children’s books. Among the books is The Palanquin Ropes, his first book of poetry, which was published by my own Voice Press in 1983 in what was planned to be a series of poetry books called Voices. The Palanquin Ropes and Bob Orr’s Cargo, published at the same time, ended up being the only ‘Voices’. I recall that we launched The Palanquin Ropes with wine, poetry and music at what used to be Johnson’s Pendragon’s Bookshop in Oneroa, the main village on Waiheke. The bookshop, located in a dilapidated building, has long gone, but Mike Johnson still sells books—those published by his family-run ‘writers’ collective’ Lasavia Publishing Ltd—on Saturday mornings at the Waiheke Ostend Market. Lasavia encompasses three imprints: 99% Press for fiction and poetry, TP Press for non-fiction, and Beansprout Press for children’s titles. Originally set up to get Johnson’s out-of-print novels back into circulation, Lasavia has grown to publishing a variety of writers and illustrators.
We’re at the library to launch three new Lasavia titles; and I say a few words about the history of Mike’s first book, which is represented by eight poems in his Selected Poems. The Selected Poems has been edited by literary critic and author Jack Ross, who also has had a book of short stories, called Ghost Stories, published by Lasavia. Poet and writer Murray Edmond speaks eloquently about Mike’s ‘magic realism’ novella Afterworld; and Mike and his partner Leila Lees take the floor to talk about, among other things, the wonderfully conceived and well-designed Sketches, in which Leila’s colour-grained-and-washed drawings and sketches accompany Mike’s poems.
The Introduction to Mike Johnson’s Selected Poems by Jack Ross begins with a poem that was first published in the eighth collection, Ladder Without Rungs:
I want you to think about it, she said.
I am, he said.
It’s not helping, she said.
Ross writes: ‘a strong sense of humour … the immense complexity of human relationships, social, sexual and everyday, is at heart of much of Mike’s best poetry. However, there’s an almost equal pull towards the empyrean: the cosmic mysteries of nature and the visual world, the beauty of the birds, trees and beaches that surround him in his long-time home-base, Waiheke Island.’
Ross selected 128 poems from the approximately 950 Johnson has published over the past 40 years. Johnson’s 12 collections are: The Palanquin Ropes, written in Whakatane, after Mike had spent eight years wandering abroad, and dedicated to the Indian medical practitioner turned philosopher Dr R.P. Kaushik (1926–81) who ‘sparked the flame’; A Woman in Mt Eden Prison & Drawing Lessons (1984); Standing Wave (1985); Span 23 (1986); Treasure Hunt (1996); The Vertical Harp: Selected poems of Li He (2006); To Beatrice Where We Crossed The Line (2014); Two Lines and a Garden (2017); Ladder With No Rungs (2019); The Toy Box: Book one of Raising Light Trilogy (2020); Hide Your Eyes: The Rumi Poems, book two of Raising Light Trilogy (2020); Extinction Rebellion: A Tribute, book three of Raising Light Trilogy: Flippity Fluppity Flop (2021) and Sketches (2023).
Reading Sketches, I’m reminded of Dr Kaushik, who published six books and travelled the world speaking on meditation and spirituality. He claimed that reality can be understood only from moment to moment, and there’s a sense of this in such lines as:
the light is frail, I know
the sand will be cool
between your toes
on the peninsular
pine trees stand stiff
waiting their moment
you have reached the bottom
of the track now
one more turn and you will vanish
into the rest of your life
sketchbook in hand
(from, ‘looking down at Matapana’)
Matapana is the Māori name for Palm Beach on Waiheke Island. For Sketches, divided into ‘Coastlines’ and ‘Interiors’, Mike Johnson and Leila Lees, partners for over four decades, respectively penned poems and drew pictures in the open air around the shores, hills and valleys of Waiheke. They also travelled north to the Coromandel and south to the Volcanic Plateau. Johnson says in his Preface: ‘It was a new experience, to write lines outside on location, sometimes standing up on a beach or headland, writing quickly without much thought. I left these raw lines as they were, without turning them into well-made poems. My intention was to capture the fleeting impressions of the moment.’
In Sketches the poet’s descriptions of the natural world feel fresh and fluent. Years of reading and writing have tuned his ear and eye so that he can rapidly notate what he observes: ‘the incoming tide is eating up the mudflats faster / than I can write these lines // the mind can run as far as / the eye can see’. Early in the book, poet Johnson and artist Lees visit Matarangi, a beachside holiday town in the Coromandel, and this is commemorated in a poem called ‘the blue drift’, which is an oblique reference to one of my own poems. There’s another connection here, back to his first book of poetry and a line from it that I’ve often quoted: ‘raw unturned thought / that wouldn’t sleep.’ We talked about such things many years ago in his writing room under the main living quarters of his Crescent Valley home. In that first book the 30-something Johnson channelled an errant old man dying, with allusions to Buddhist practice, Zen poetry and Māori mythology. We shared an interest in a lean, unadorned poetry of counted syllables, along with notions of existence and non-existence. My poem features a gull, sea and sky, and little else: ‘the blue drift’, among other things, takes in ‘distant dark hills … [and a] line of holiday homes in their / spooky / immaculate emptiness // all this was once a vast wetland / … teeming with birds.’
Mike’s interest in ancient Eastern literature is present in varying degrees in his poetry. The Rumi Poems features the 13th century Persian poet (‘Rumi stays at home / making syllables out of the darkness / and like blowing kisses, / sends them off into the night / into the care of the vagrant winds’); while The Vertical Harp contains a selection of poems by Chinese poet Li He, who lived during the mid-Tang dynasty. Li He died aged 26; his work is characterised by striking imagery and despair: ‘here I am, barely twenty, hopes turned to dust / I’m all sadness and grief, an orchid under a death sentence.’ Mike sourced and reworked his selections from three different Li He translations.
Flicking through the Selected Poems, I land on a poem called ‘as we lived’ that I’d previously read on his Facebook page. It impressed me because of its restrained disgust and matter-of-fact clockwork: ‘Our history will be written in rock / in the fossil records / in broken landscapes / and plastic filled oceans // the planet itself will be our memorial / and our obituaries will be carved / from violent skies / and a shimmering heat haze // a short-lived species, as species go / for as we lived, we died.’ This originally appeared in Extinction Rebellion: A tribute. Some of our world is already in the poem; the rest is a probability if we continue to live in a fossil-fuelled world.
But what do we know of the future? We take a kind of comfort in the past, as Mike manifests it in Sketches: ‘there is my mother / bending over herself / there is my father / who turns into a spade / sticking up out of the potato patch / there is the familiar sky / aired / and neatly folded in the linen cupboard.’ At the core of Sketches is a landscape of the heart. The names of Mike Johnson and Leila Lees carry equal weight on the cover. They’ve travelled together to balance poem and picture; one enhances the other; this makes for an attractive book.
Toward its end, there’s a reveal, a shift to: ‘a long withheld truth’. Once, it would be called ‘the love that dare not speak its name.’ The dedication, ‘To L upon her coming out as being a bisexual’, prefaces a dozen poems that have a complicated syntax. They carry the poet’s pain: there’s another person in the picture. ‘I don’t know if I’ll get a space / to catch up with myself / let alone find you / in the mess of everything else // ps: sketchbook on the table / plums in the fridge.’ And so, the book ends.
Mike Johnson has had health problems, but the will to write endures. ‘Can you envisage a life without writing?’ I ask him while we’re out walking the day after the launch. ‘No,’ he says almost indignantly, ‘I’m a writer, that’s what I do, I write.’
light can’t be stopped
everything it touches it frees
in a moment or two it will touch
this bench on which I’m sitting
and free me
*
i’m too close to death
to feel entirely comfortable
*
if I have to die
let it be with the sound of water
running through my head
all the wind would need to do
is close my eyes
(from ‘Ruapehu pieces’, Sketches)
Afterworld is a novella-length ghost story by Mike Johnson that’s touted as magic realism. We find our male narrator dead, but existing in an afterworld, searching for clues about his life; evidently, ‘the dead don’t sleep; death is eternal wakefulness … We are drawn to the moment of our death as flies to meat, but it remains beyond our grasp. We hover with nowhere to land; we seek where there is nothing to find. Our death eludes us, as time itself eludes us. Only the odour remains.’
The narrator is aware of the smell of an old army blanket, and he can recite the dates and names of wars, but he has no memory of his living self, of his tribe, of whether he was a good man or a bad man or a victim of circumstance. However, he can shapeshift from man to hermaphrodite to woman back to man. He has an ‘imaginal mind’ and an ‘imaginal body’ with ‘barely a wisp of human consciousness’.
The narrative action takes place on a mountain track to a tramper’s hut. Here, he meets a fellow ghost, a little girl, with whom he bonds. They move among crowds oblivious to them, although dogs can smell their ghostly odour. This little book provides wave after wave of Johnson’s extraordinary image-making. He has the literary skill to turn out a highly inventive tale, which at times becomes lyrical and euphoric:
I evaporated in an instant. I was the music, both its expression and its underlying structure. I was each individual note, and I was the melody. As the music, I was able to create realms, extensions of space made possible by the disclosure of beauty. This music did not happen within time. It created time in which it could have its being. It was a form of life. It was my blood.
LINDSAY RABBITT is a poet, writer and small press-publisher based on the Kapiti Coast. His books include the essay-memoir, These Lives I Have Buried (2004), the poetry collection Prayers for the Living & the Dead (2021), and his most recent book is New & Collected Poems & Images published by 99% Press, an imprint of Lasavia Publishing, in association with Voice Press (2024).
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