Ruel Johnson
Ian on Sunday
By Ian McDonald
Stabroek News
March 2, 2003
In 2002 Ruel Johnson won the Guyana Prize for Literature for best first book of fiction with his accomplished collection Ariadne and Other Stories. At 22 he is the youngest winner of the Guyana Prize. What makes this achievement still more notable is that also in the 2002 Guyana Prize awards his book of poems The Enormous Night was runner up in the category, Best First Book of Poems. Guyana Prizes for Literature are awarded by distinguished international panels and are not lightly won.
Having read both books in manuscript, and having seen some of his earlier work, I can safely say that Ruel Johnson is the best young writer to emerge in Guyana in at least a generation.
I write now of Ruel Johnson the poet and specifically the poems in The Enormous Night. In some of this poetry I sense the equivalent of what I sensed long ago in the strokeplay of the young Kanhai, the young Hooper - something much more memorable than the usual.
There are twenty-eight poems carefully wrought, and even interestingly annotated, in The Enormous Night. In the collection, divided into six sequences called 'Books,' are impassioned love poems, laments for love lost, poems of bitter and sometimes scornful social and political commentary, and autobiographical highlights perhaps taken from journal entries and vividly crafted and polished into poems. All are worth reading carefully for the good and simple reason that all of them, even the intensely personal lyrics, have been clearly thought about and carefully written.
I found the love poems and the laments for lost love strong and moving, influenced, I think, but not spoiled by memories of Pablo Neruda's fervent and tumultuous love poems.
Ever, a poem written for John and Angela Cropper about the loss of their only son, is written with great and heartfelt sensitivity. Such poems are hard to write well. It appears in Book III in a sequence of poems which is based on the poet's stay in Trinidad as a member of the young Caribbean writers' workshop sponsored by the Cropper Foundation. This experience has given rise to a fine series of poems including Grand Riviere which gives a particularly vivid portrayal of a time and place and people caught in a loving memory-flash.
In the category of social and political commentary, I have rarely read a more excoriating and splendidly scornful portrait of public venality as in the poem Portrait 1 in Book IV ('Chorus of Shadows'). And I thought that Heroes, Maidens, Chains and Monsters and A Journal (in which, I should wryly note, there is a mild dig at this writer and his Sunday column) are poems full of necessary scorn and even despair about "this place":
this place lost
its poetry too early
replaced it with the pyromania of political will.
Poets young in the art generally suffer from two failings: they are inclined to be over-influenced by the great poets who have helped to inspire their love of poetry; and they tend to leave in too much in the first poems they write, not pruning and crafting enough, feeling that everything their fervent imaginations produce in abundance is too precious to abandon.
Understandably, Ruel Johnson is not yet immune from these tendencies. However, his voice is emerging clearly among the echoes. And I do not think a single one of the 28 poems in The Enormous Night has been dashed down on paper and left there without the essential hard work of revision and re-creation. Here then is a young poet who will not stand still. He will not remain dependent on his peers. He will not for long feel pleased and comfortable with his current work. In an interview after winning the Guyana Prize, Ruel Johnson said: "I intend to write. I can't see myself doing anything other than writing: it's impossible..." The willingness to work here and single-mindedly to master the craft of writing is important.
All good poetry asserts that life, even in its darkest times, has an underlying, momentous significance. To all appearances the universe may seem empty and without purpose yet somehow we feel that it is not so. "And some certain significance lurks in all things," Herman Melville through Ishmael in Moby Dick tells us, "else all things are little worth and the round world itself an empty cipher." Good poetry strengthens our faith that what Ishmael says is true and that we and the whole world and life itself are not here for nothing. When I put down young Ruel Johnson's first collection of poetry I had this feeling that here was writing of this kind in the bud and I felt joy for him, for us.
