Review
Title: An Imperfect Roundness
Author: Melody Newey Johnson
Publisher: By Common Consent Press
Genre: Poetry
Year Published: 2020
Number of Pages: 88
Binding: Paperback; Digital (Kindle)
ISBN-10: 1948218291
ISBN-13: 978-1948218290
Price: Paperback, $10.95; Digital, $7.95
Reviewed by Tyler Chadwick for the Association for Mormon Letters
The Textures of Entanglement in Melody Newey Johnson’s An Imperfect Roundness: An Invocation
Melody Newey Johnson opens her first poetry collection, An Imperfect Roundness, with an invocation titled “Last Night I Prayed.” The poem exemplifies, for me, the real grace and potency of Johnson’s book: the poet’s ability to populate economical verse with the depth and abundance of human experience. She invokes a dynamic field of personal and shared history, culture, and emotion with her often short and simple lines and her focus on the everyday realities and reachings of her everyday experience as a woman.
Her opening petition appears simple enough:
I want this life
to be easy.
God said:
It is. (p. 1)
In the subtext of these simple statements, though, I see depth and complexity—the intricacy of relation, a concept in which the collection is rooted and from which the collection unfolds. The poet’s “I,” for instance, invokes the textures of selfhood and self-representation. The pronoun and the literary artifice that brings it to our attention assume a behind-the-text flesh-and-blood being—an individual whose life, identity, and poems have been shaped by the particularities of her experience in the world. As with all of us, her desires, intentions, perception, and agency emerge from the inescapable entangling of her biological systems (her body), her physical, social, and cultural environments, and her individual choices and their overall accumulation. Her reasons for writing, the things she writes about, and the first-person persona through which she filters and presents them result from and respond to these entanglements.
She offers up her poetic preoccupations and her reasons for writing in the preface: “This collection,” she says, “explores the lived experience of womanhood, motherhood, aging, loss, and healing, through spiritual inquiry grounded in faith and in the natural world.” So, she’s writing as a woman whose womanhood has grown out of and been shaped by the lived realities of bearing and raising children, a frequent focus of her meditations; of physical and mental senescence; of losing—and losing touch with—people, places, possessions, beliefs, and dreams; of nursing others to health and wholeness, and being so nursed in return; and of religious and spiritual wayfaring. Her preoccupations and intentions inhere in this latter act: as she bears witness, “God appears everywhere within these pages”, often, she suggests, as viewed through her Mormon faith tradition but also in a way that, she “hope[s]” will “appeal to believers in any spiritual practice and, more broadly, to anyone with imagination and a desire to see the magic and divine in everyday moments” (p. xi). Her invocation’s “I”—notably the collection’s first word—comes already burdened with such history and expectations. From the beginning, it invites readers to wonder and wander with a thinking feeling seeking believing still-unfolding being whose unique personhood and humanity has produced and curated this collection of poems and whose desires inspired her to reach out to readers and to God with her invocation.
I read the call-and-response format of her petition as reiterating this reaching toward relation, which can only arise from and be answered in the intra-action of particular bodies. The poet calls out to God from the depth and richness of her selfhood and desires, believing that God will understand and respond to the antecedents of her petition: the unspoken meanings shrouded in the penumbra of expression. She can be seen representing these muted signifiers in the poem with the italicized “life” in the right margin. I take the differentiated word as a textual whisper embellishing her declaration as a clarifying parenthetical—“I want this (meaning, life in general) to be easy”—and/or as the specific condition demonstrated by the pronoun—“I want this life (e.g., this life that I’ve chosen, this life I’ve been given, this life as opposed to my previous life or to that life, this particular life as a poet, a woman, a mother, an aging body, a mourner of lost things, a healer, a believer, a spiritual seeker) to be easy.” However we read the italicized noun into the petition, its presence on the page multiplies the poem’s interpretive possibilities, complicating and enriching its semantic ecology: its expansive network of meanings and the relationships that both sustain and arise from this network. The italicized noun and its participation in the poem’s ecology can thus be seen anticipating life itself, which emerges from, sustains, and is sustained by relationships among disparate bodies.
Our inevitable and necessary dwelling in these relational networks makes our lives easier—and more complex. Born into the reciprocity of relationship, we forge bonds that serve our emotional, physical, and spiritual needs and that can thereby ease the apprehensions that accompany the will to survive. More, in our interactions we reiterate life’s basic processes: the give and take of breathing, eating, drinking, intercourse, which is made easy by the impositions of instinct. The life-easing assurances of connection and instinct, however, open toward the persistent complications of being-in relation. In this light, God’s response to the poet—“It is”—can be interpreted not just as a witness that life and its basic processes come to us easily, without much effort on our part, but also as a witness of life’s essential relationality, of the reciprocity between and among things that keeps all things vital and that situates us in the complex network of systems that sustains individuals and groups. While we might easily, intuitively comprehend and acknowledge this concept, it can be—in practice—challenging, messy, and complicated.
By opening her collection with a prayer whose call and response can be understood performing these dual realities, Newey frames the collection as an exploration of life’s vital entanglements—between lovers; between mother and child; among an individual and her body, desires, culture, and history; between a believer and her God, whom she presents along the way as both Father and Mother. Given that she launches her exploration by staging an example of this last entanglement, she can be understood doing at least three things: First, she seems to stress the primacy of prayer in her response to life’s exigent relationality. Second, she seems to stress the primacy of her relationship with God in her life journey as well as in her lyric journey. And third, she seems to offer these primacies to readers as agencies by which to engage with her poetry.
Such an engagement could begin here: Poetry and prayer share a common origin in desire, which poets and supplicants embody with words. Johnson’s longing comes to us from the outset: “I want,” she says, bearing witness that she has unmet needs. Beyond reiterating an existential truth—to live is to want—her statement shows her claiming wholeness as a woman. Women have long been expected to pour themselves out so that others—spouses, children, society—might be filled. I read her “I want” as acknowledging how this expectation has made her “hungry for [her] self” while at the same time it’s led her to “fill [her] belly with / everything else” (to borrow language from her poem “Fish Bones”) (p. 16). In her invocatory acknowledgment, though, I see her reclaiming her need before God, an act of repentance—of turning back to the selfhood life demands of all of us—that unfolds across her poetry.
Because that’s the path the collection takes: the way of metanoia, which leads to wholeness and holiness but only by moving us along—and deeper into—the skeins and through the textures of a life lived entangled in an effusive, Gordian material and moral universe. Don’t let this promise of complexity keep you from reading the book, though. Johnson’s poetry is as conversational, straightforward, and quotidian as it is intricately woven, elusive, and unexpected. This may seem like a contradiction—and, of course, it is. But so is life, and the best art, which, like life, thrives in contradiction—in the open-ended and fecund interactions among diverse, often oppositional bodies. In An Imperfect Roundness, Johnson wrestles with these realities as they have emerged from her lived experience; and she does so using a lyric voice and style that promises to speak deeply to a wide range of readers.