Paper Bark Press
Telepathy
2001, 96 pages, softcover, 215x150mm
ISBN 1 877004 86 3
Cover painting by Brian Calvin
Telepathy is a book about possibility, and Devin Johnston enters this realm with great skill, navigating time and space. He is a poet who has learnt from elders like Duncan and Creeley how to exploit what Olson called the 'Post Modern' and bring to light half-forgotten origins. How apt that this powerful first book was written in the US and published in Australia.
'Telepathy is brilliantly written and delightfully readable.'
~ Robert Adamson
'While his lexicon is rich and particular, Johnston's line is severe, unadorned, and keenly cut to measure out the subtle, counter-pointed music which so strongly marks these poems. If he asserts that 'Souls never touch / their objects', Johnston's vision is nevertheless essentially phenomenological. Despite the fact that they span nearly a decade of his writing life, the poems of Telepathy cohere around Johnston's intensely focused exploration of a subject that is inextricably bound up in a physical world and mediated by language. His words are equally 'land-marks'. Reading this remarkable book, we take a journey that alters our perception and so remaps our lives.'
~ Forrest Gander
'I read these poems as lovely, strange, and mystico-historical ... '
~ Fanny Howe