Stella Johnstons poems in Without a Witness invite the reader into widelydifferent places from the nightmarish landscape of a morphine hallucinationto the last ... » 

Stella Johnstons poems in Without a Witness invite the reader into widelydifferent places from the nightmarish landscape of a morphine hallucinationto the last few moments of a Gary Cooper western to the bedside of a dyingRoman emperor in a field tent in Persia. The acute perception whether one ofpain joy grief remorse or relief figures in every poems attempt to holdonto something essential. At times moments of loss become almostindistinguishable from moments of enlightenment even terrible cruelty turnsinto the ironic counterpart to knowledge by which something after all isgained. For Johnston language provides the means to pursue relentlessly thatsingular detail or sequence of images or events that may reveal in thecontexts provided by experience the luminous underside of human perception.Whether meditating along the lines of complete global catastrophe as prophesiedin Aztec symbology or reflecting on a terminally ill mans visit to a live sexshow in Paris or responding to a little girls morbid grief about a doll lostin a backyard fire each poem is finally an affirmation of the will to embracelife no matter what no matter how. «