cover image The Ice Lizard: Poems, 1977-88

The Ice Lizard: Poems, 1977-88

Judith Emlyn Johnson. Sheep Meadow Press, $12.95 (95pp) ISBN 978-1-878818-17-1

Midway through this volume, the poet tells of ``this strong woman / who tossed her own talent out for the laundry, the dishes, / the crafting of her children's minds.'' And so this seems to be almost autobiographical. Writing under the name Judith Johnson Sherwin, Johnson's Uranium Poems won the Yale Younger Poets Prize in 1969. Six other books were published during the next decade, but this is her first collection since 1979. As in her previous writings, these long-lined, rhythmic poems, caught somewhere between jazz and the most haunting of nursery rhymes, require several readings to be fully understood. The startling presence of the ice lizard serves as a metaphor for the suppressed self. Poems conversing with this half-dead animal uncovered in the root cellar open the book's first three sections and appear near the end of the fourth, where the lizard is ``she whom i had left there / when i had no more strength.'' Borrowing imagery from art and politics, Johnson struggles to record more than her own petty travails, but it is when she is most personal--as in the three ``Before Notre Dame'' poems, in which she stands before the cathedral and resolves various internal conflicts--that she is at her best. (Sept.)