Jim Johnstone’s Dog Ear

With its mix of scientific observation and metaphysical questioning, Jim Johnstone’s latest poetry collection, Dog Ear, recalls similar procedures in the poetry of Leigh Kotsilidis. Whereas Kotsilidis accepts the incompletions inherent in fact and fancy, equably so, Johnstone’s speculative conclusions are anguished, the product of a mind obsessive enough to follow the circuitous and repetitive paths of logic, but intelligent enough to know its not likely to offer more than provisional understanding. The titular opener displays this frustrated investigation:

It was years before I learned to call
this prayer: the right-hand corner
of a page turned down to make another
page. I attempted to escape, then return
to the boneyard where I’d removed
an earring from my wife’s right ear—
diamond, the crux of the universe,
contracting to leave a pin-sized hole
midair. In that margin, my words
remain transfixed until she disappears—
proof that while I swore the world
I’d created would double like a hand
beneath my own, it merely stretches
before me in consolation. There, there.

“Dog Ear” also demonstrates Johnstone’s – I want to call it ‘facility’, but that’s not the right word – strange blend of anecdote, metaphor, and fantasy. In isolation, those components don’t provide a vehicle for even provisional understanding, but a readerly  juggling act conjures an organic unfolding, climax, and denouement, classic structures that, in Johnstone’s effort, muddies and perplexes, while closing on an anti-epiphany, the final two-word repetition either compassionate or maliciously diverting.

The metaphysical questing is a constant throughout the collection, and an obsessive trope that supports it is flying/falling. In “Complementarity” (“All that’s lost is given shape -- /a hand crushed under Boeing/fuselage”), in “Inland” (“our company’s shade/lifts likeness from stands of birch, blots/retreating lanes of wind: our pilot”), in “Evel Knievel Negotiates the Fountain at Caesar’s Palace” (I groped around and found myself/unmoored at latitude”), and in “Ariadne’s Thread” (“Our pact: to climb against  winter’s rush --/mad, uncoupled”), the narrator is caught in a tragic fix: wise enough to know of gravity’s inviolable law, but restless enough to want to transcend it anyway, however knowingly futile the attempt. In this, Johnstone’s dilemma (acceptance of entropy vs  spiritual desire for transcendence mated with its infinitesimally small likelihood of  realization) can only be recorded and aesthetically investigated, if not unified.

The biggest weakness of this volume is Johnstone’s over-reliance on the high-toned, even vatic, register. The poems are good enough – and some of them are more than good – so that the tone doesn’t create an unfortunate parody of itself, and I also realize that  existential burrowing isn’t an avocation, but an occasional self-puncturing (“Evel Knievel” ’s “body tossed ass-first/over the gas tank’s hive” a stick-out exception) would be more than welcome.