The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly: Poems Collected and New

by Denis Johnson

Overview

From the award-winning poet and novelist—a must-have collection of his four previous books of poetry plus a selection of new, unpublished work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780061869549
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	03/03/2009
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	555 KB

About the Author

Denis Johnson is the author of The Name of the World, Already Dead, Jesus' Son, Resuscitation of a Hanged Man, Fiskadoro, The Stars at Noon, and Angels. His poetry has been collected in the volume The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly. He is the recipient of a Lannan Fellowship and a Whiting Writer's Award, among many other honors for his work. He lives in northern Idaho.

Editorial Reviews

Lately known more for his fiction (Jesus' Son, LJ 2/1/92), Johnson attracted attention in the 1980s for a poetry that depicted a disillusioned America driven to strangeness by media addiction and consumerism, a nation of "Face-owners... impossible to impress, dead inside,/ Looking for somebody they can trust again,/Someone to make them feel betrayed one more time." This awkwardly titled omnibus collects the author's four published poetry collections, adding 16 poems written since The Veil (LJ 7/87). Sleepwalking the same moonlit territory of self-negation and despair opened by Mark Strand three decades ago, Johnson tries to spike the bleakness with complex images ("All night the moon rings like a telephone/in an empty booth above our separateness") that often devolve into confused abstractions. Where the early work can seem too somber and self-pitying, and the later poems too smug in their formulas, "The Incognito Lounge" and several other pieces still impress with their spectral invention but not sufficiently so to support a retrospective of this size.-Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, N.Y.

Library Journal