My introduction to Johnson was Ark, which I continue to be awed by. However, The Book of the Green Man is a completely different kind of book. Stunning bucolic imagery put into conversation with major Romantic and Augustan figures. I get little sense of pressure put on the blindspots of Romanticism--and I suppose I don't get the usefulness of that from a 1967 perspective. Charles Olson is an obvious influence over this work, but unlike Johnson here, Olson offers historiographic awareness of nature as an ideological construction, and he refutes Romanticism as much as he condones it. I do like the material texture of the poems--their engagement with sources, and the organization of the book into a sort of daybook of the seasons. It enacts the changes in the world in interesting parallel structures over the course of the year, but again, without much pressure on conventional nature writing with the exception of the field guide discourse that resists glossing over any plants (as would be more typical of some nature writing). Its a good book to read to get a sense of the early formulations of what he would more astoundingly accomplish in The Valley of Many Colored Grasses (1969).

It's a perfect book, what can I say. It's perfect. There are poems in it but on the whole there are no poems because it is a book before the poems, it's a book before the existence of the poet, it's a book and it's totally normal, no fancy stuff, but on my god wonderful, and it moves is it's this perfect action through time. It's perfect. ( )