The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone
Coach House Books,
2023
The poet sets the tone for the collection with an epigraph from Henry Scott Holland, who was a professor of divinity at Oxford, and who later became the canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. Holland’s sermon reads, in part: “Death is nothing at all. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I and you are you…” Here is an anchor, a place to begin, a place where there is a ‘before’ and an ‘after’—a before time, in terms of the pandemic, but also in terms of the poet’s receiving a life changing medical diagnosis. The King of Terrors explores issues of mortality, and of changes in life and health, in a way that inspires the reader to reflect upon their own life’s progress. Anyone who has struggled with physical or mental health issues and diagnoses—when the illusion of thinking they have any control over their body is absolutely shattered—will no doubt find that this brilliant poetic work will resonate and ripple.
Johnstone’s pandemic poems, including “TL; DR”, “Symptomatology,” “Self-Portrait as Statistical Life Expectancy,” “Hematology,” as well as the title poem, are evocative of that first lockdown. The poet reminds readers of the time when health care workers and first responders were loudly praised from rooftops and balconies by “those banging/pots and pans,” pointing out that we praised them even though they were “forced/to protect us./Those who know/the virus is perfect, hell-loving,/always an inch from death.” Throughout this grouping of poems, we are reminded that fear is also contagious, an infection that spreads just as easily as a virus. In “King of the Terrors,” Johnstone writes, “First there was fear. Fear of being shut in, a continent of shut-/ins, shut up” and considers how fear behaves when it is allowed to run free. In “Symptomatology,” the poet reflects on how he might mistake his wife for a “bird of prey,” when no one—not even the ones we loved—is ‘safe.’ This is a world that is so uncertain, sometimes “the ceiling will loosen, twist/off, and disappear” and the stars, “where boundaries break down//are replaced by words/ like I’ll be there soon or stay there.” Connections were tested by love, and faith in goodness and hope, but things fell apart.
The poems that Johnstone has written about his brain tumour diagnosis—a left-frontal lobe meningioma—aptly and artfully mirror the uncertainty of his pandemic pieces. The photos placed inside the manuscripts are images from the poet’s brain scans are ghostly, and the tumour itself makes an appearance in visual form. In “Slice-Selective Excitation (Brain Scans 1-5),” the poet plays with white space on the page, letting words move haltingly across the paper on one page, and then filling in the outline of a brain with poetry. What’s held within the containers of our brains? So much that we do not understand. Johnstone dances with that notion, but also documents the course of his diagnosis and treatment, combining the medical with the emotional, spiritual, physical, and poetic. The tumour becomes both a “penny dropped from a great height,” a “planet pressing down,” and it “piles up like snow. Asking: are you awake yet?” Pain makes an appearance throughout the sequence, with the final poem stating, “Every cell hurts.” In the poetic sequence, “There is Nothing More Invasive Than Snow,” Johnstone writes of his impending surgery, speaking directly to his doctor: “Lift my skull/away/from skin/up and out/like Yorick.” The snow that is falling in various places throughout the collection is quiet in its essence—not unlike the way in which a tumour grows in a quiet and insidious fashion.
There’s much love here, too, and it makes itself known in poems that reference the poet’s wife, Erica. In “Anniversary,” there’s the beautiful comparison of how cherry tree blossoms shake “the way/my hands/shook the day//you married me.” And in “Invitation (Set to Summer Radio),” a request for Erica to enter a swimming pool is a metaphor that soon becomes a bed where the two float on “cushioned springs, [where] we can touch/the bottom without coming up for air.”
In The King of Terrors, Jim Johnstone writes with a keen awareness of varying points of view: here is the day-to-day of how we make (and record) the meticulous detail of the world around us as poets, and then, here is a view of life that comes from somewhere even bigger, when we’re forced to think personally of our own mortality, and of our own loves and losses. The way in which time moves, too, as we age and deal with health issues, weaves itself into the poems. As an honest admission here, I have been a fan and admirer of Johnstone’s poetic work for a long time. The King of Terrors feels raw and honest in its subject matter (because it is) and Johnstone’s strength is (as always) his genuine skill as a poet and craftsman of language, but also in his being vulnerable in opening up about this challenging period in his life. He has transformed it with poetry, and that is a gift he gives to all of his readers.
Kim Fahner lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario. Her latest book of poems is Emptying the Ocean (Frontenac House, 2022). She is the Ontario Representative for The Writers' Union of Canada (2020-24), a member of the League of Canadian Poets, and a supporting member of the Playwrights Guild of Canada. Kim's first novel, The Donoghue Girl, will be published by Latitude 46 Publishing in Spring 2024. She may be reached via her author website at www.kimfahner.com