Paper Bark Press

Telepathy

'While his lexicon is rich and particular, Johnston's line is severe, unadorned, and keenly cut to measure out the subtle, counterpointed 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 "landmarks." Reading this remarkable book, we take a journey that alters our perception and so remaps our lives.'
~ Forrest Gander

'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 U.S. and published in Australia. Telepathy is brilliantly written and delightfully readable.'
~ Robert Adamson

'I read these poems as lovely, strange, and mystico-historical...'
~ Fanny Howe

'Johnston works along revitalized lyric lines with a distinctive sense of rhyme and take on love and loss: "Memory marks / time in changing / station, accent / or form of work // yet has no finer / calibration. / And so a crack / runs through this cup." In six sections of finely wrought but always lucid and luminous work, Johnston takes up Beckett's distinction between 'Molloy & Mollose,' sings 'Belated Songs' and makes 'Insinuations,' "A trembling horizon/ of elocution."'
~ Publisher's Weekly

'Devin Johnston's Telepathy is a first collection that explores ideas ... His rhetoric is sharply particular and in these poems the short-line forms provide an epigrammic focus on meanings, connection, and possibility. Here, paradoxically, we know that there is more going on than meets the eye. So 'Vacations' I and IV deal only superficially with travel and with distance as they foreground, rather, play of the mind and of meanings. It is this sense of mediation, and of telepathic perception, that is caught in the following image from 'West': "Belly down on a sandstone shelf / like Remington's / ranger, I keep watch on pools of / tenebrous sun / and reflection – another self." In 'Thunder Road,' a son "not yet born" speculates that he might have warned his parents, "telepathically," what would result from their meeting. In 'Telepathy,' memory and dreams interweave with ideas of childhood, marriage, and parents that address change itself, together with the processes of perception that determine one's sense of time, place, and history.'
~ Brian Edwards, Australian Book Review

'It comes as no surprise that Devin Johnston had to go all the way to Sydney to get his superb first book published. At once casually introspective and rigorously musical, Telepathy nestles in nicely with Paper Bark's progressive oeuvre, not to mention that of the Oz poetry scene in general. While many American large presses continue to favor complacently autobiographical verse (much of which pays homage to the self and its travails at the expense of poetic form) and many smaller, independent houses inundate readers with a younger set's vacuous, hollowly ironic mode, writers like Johnston are developing a complex, resonant hybrid of carnival music and classicism. These poems are flashy but not without substance, sophisticated but never distractingly cerebral, painstakingly structured and curious of the world outside the poet-self. Forward-looking lines such as "starlings flock / or skirr / for cockling crust / and pithless hull," "Tract or blade / would scarp a hill / / neither 'mine' / Dear Loss, nor 'made'" and "Sunset, septic rose / Sand would turn to glass / and skies absorb its ash / if sun but chose" hark back to a poetic tradition centered on the sensible, well-turned phrase rather than bland, arbitrarily broken prose. Johnston's centerpiece, the annotated title poem—as well as longer poems like "Commentaries on 'The Witch of Atlas'" and "Molloy and Mollose"—is both lapidary and elusive, fringed with subtle gems ("Three paths were open to me, / all equally impassable") and enigmatic verité narrative ("I hovered in / syringa's meager shade / where the keeper cupped / a little bird"). In one poem Johnston implies the mental process is that of "the dull metal blade / [that] divides, divides," but the poet himself is unencumbered by such mechanism.'
~ Ethan Paquin, Boston Review

'Tight, unadorned lines notably mark Devin Johnston's remarkable poems. With a provocatively rich vocabulary, he dives into etymological currents to show words in relation to others and to things in the world. There is great pleasure here, a forced musicality of formal mastery. The instincts rush about within these playful song structures, sublimated, yet retaining a kind of vitality essential to poetry.'
~ Dale Smith, First Intensity

'Devin Johnston's Telepathy has an unnerving, foreign beauty. These richly allusive, densely written poems linger at the edge of memory after the eye has grazed the words on the page. To this I can attest, as I have been reading Telepathy intermittently for about six months, mulling, setting it aside, but the book keeps finding its way back into my hands. For me, the intriguing quality of the book is that it is able to function as a conveyance both because of, and despite, its challenge and difficulty. As its very title would suggest, these poems communicate by some other means than mere sensory perception, perhaps a "desire so tangled tongue / could never / make it understood." Not that this is a disembodied poetry or in any sense devoid of sensual pleasure. Johnston may well have the best ear of any poet of his generation. His prosody has an almost sleight of hand deftness, permitting him to integrate rhyme with the full naturalness of speech.'
~ Elizabeth Robinson, Small Press Traffic, San Francisco 2003

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