Vespers East & West: Selected Poems 1972-2010

David Johannesen’s varied collection envisions the poem as an occasion to relive memories, revisit people lost to death and divorce, and reflect on the nature of change that makes past and present come together in remembrance. “Memory is a dissolving of the self,” he writes. In these pages, couples negotiate their desires, lost lovers account for the mistakes they made, new lovers rejoice in the pleasures they have found. In one poem, a warm eye is cast on a young father stepping gingerly around his son’s college life. In others, there are elegies for loved ones whose absences have been marked by confusion, and there are paeans to sailing and fishing, to mountainous, desert and coastal landscapes. The past is mapped as a geography of memories in these poems: from the Uinta Mountains of Utah, the mannered lanes of Charleston, to the busy streets of Lower Manhattan. In this way, Johannesen captures the fragmented and intemperate nature of life itself.