Dorothy Johnson

My Heart Remembers Dorothy Johnson

from the foreword by Anna Mundow

"If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all," John Keats declares in a letter to a friend in 1818. And Dorothy Johnson, writing a little over two hundred years later, has reached the same conclusion.

"I cannot force a poem/like an amaryllis/in a pot . . .," she observes in one of the many gems that make up this collection. A stray thought or memory, a change in the weather, a recent death, an ancient myth-any one of them may alight like a bird at her backyard feeder, demanding attention and sparking her imagination. Then, gradually and mysteriously, her "moment of vision," as another English poet once described it, becomes something that we, too, can see and feel.

Some of the poems here are like good jokes. They take us by surprise-ever thought about gravity and . . . gravy? Others touch the heart, as Dorothy, in her dedication, imagines cardiac surgeons doing when they replaced her leaky valve. Still others capture the anxieties and absurdities of our current times. But thanks to Dorothy's light touch-which has been perfected over a lifetime of reading and writing-the overall effect, whatever the subject, is delightful.

As you read, you may feel as though you have been welcomed into her kitchen where a variety of objects, some whimsical, some elegant, catch the eye. Then you realize that somehow all four seasons of the New England year along with a handful of ancestors and an assortment of Greek gods has materialized at the table. This sly magician has conjured them all-and more-out of thin air. And what a feast it is.