Loon Echo

Roger Nash is a professor of philosophy at Laurentian University, and
the editor of Spring-Feaver: An Anthology of Poems from the Ontario
Division of the League of Canadian Poets.

Reading this celebration of life at the family cottage over successive
summers is like looking at another family’s photo album. You
appreciate the warm heart behind the lens, but regret the
photographer’s failure to capture the vitality of the moment.

In addition to typographical errors and misspellings, Johnson’s poems
are marred by stereotypical images (“leaves rustle”), sugary
sentimentality (“The pines sob all afternoon, / in memorium”), and
graceless language (“he recapitulates his ontogeny”). Content is
another problem. In his introductory comments, Johnson speaks of his
poems as “trifles” that are part of a “private journal.” If they
are trifles, why should we read them?

Despite the overall weakness of this collection, there are a handful of
poems that show Johnson to be a writer of promise. “The Unkindest
Cut,” for example, combines humor with an appealing allegorical
richness.