Mosses and Lichens: Poems
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Not days of anger
but days of mild congestion,
infants of inconstant sorrow,
days of foam in gutters,
blossoms and snow
mingling where they fall,
a spring of cold profusion.
If a rolling stone gathers no moss, the poems in Devin Johnston’s Mosses and Lichens attend to what accretes over time, as well as to what erodes. They often take place in the middle of life’s journey, at the edge of the woods, at the boundary of human community and wild spaces. Following Ovid, they are poems of subtle transformation and transfer. They draw on early blues and rivers, on ironies and uncertainties, guided by enigmatic signals: “an orange blaze that marks no trail.” From image to image, they render fleeting experiences with etched precision. As Ange Mlinko has observed, “Each poem holds in balance a lapidary concision and utter lushness of vowel-work,” forming a distinctive music.
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We pay our respect to Elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today. We honour more than sixty thousand years of storytelling, art and culture.
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