Distributary is the newly-published collection by poet Luke Johnson, and is the second installment in a planned trilogy. This collection follows Quiver and features the same speaker, who is at once hopeful and diminished by grief. Johnson explores themes including fatherhood, illness, inherited trauma and abiding love.
Do you want to know what I love most about Distributary? Its ability to balance itself on a beam of light as narrow as a reed. For water flows through these poems, splitting itself into single streams then rushing back together. Water distributes itself, and in doing so, charges, depletes and recharges itself. The male speaker at the center of this collection (and its predecessor in the series) experiences his own life as rushes, turns and pools of stillness – some shallow, some deep – before the rapids can be heard just ahead.
Consider these lines from “Chimera”:
In the reeds,
a womb revealed
a doe unborn,
& my father, lost,
spared me the sight,
before slipping
it into the stream. I confess,
when the beast fell
& baby sank,
I could hear a hum
erupt from water
then sweep
across the fields.
Is your heart beating a bit faster now?
The natural world figures heavily into these carefully-wrought poems. With language that deftly avoids ornamentation, Johnson manages to write quietly into our most tender places. The places where relationships, in all their complex iterations, sink and/or rise toward their own authenticity. That is to say, Johnson avoids making heroes out of dead men and sick children. Instead, he studies them with genuine curiosity and allows his readers to do the same.
One of my favorite poems in this book appears in the section entitled Memory. “Tether” opens with a vivid narrative, mined from the speaker’s teenage years, during which he killed a bird with an air soft gun.
It’s true before
I wept
I held
the bird
and examined
where
the pellet
entered,
but I refuse
to own the lie
that boys
find pleasure
in breaking things.
Having disarmed his readers with this tender admission, Johnson manages to lead us to both the speaker’s deceased father and his own young son, with whom he is on an outing to the zoo. He builds layers of meaning for each of the two narratives by setting them up to rely on each other. Yes, each story can stand alone, but together, they expand and amplify each other. In other words, generations are placed alongside each other so that they can mean something to each other.
By the poem’s final lines, every living being can hear themselves being called by the poet. He’s asking all of us to arrive, though we are wounded by the past and exalted by the present moment.
I’m avoiding
where I planted
the bird, friend,
I’m too afraid
to tell you.
So instead
let’s watch
the feeders swarm
and awe at how
my son smiles
while pointing to a fin.
Both technically proficient and beautifully rendered, these poems are a baptism. I look forward to Johnson’s third collection in the trilogy.
— Dara-Lyn Shrager