Jim Johnstone's The Chemical LifeReviewed by Carla Scarano D'Antonio
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Artificial paradises, simulated effects and drug addiction are investigated in Jim Johnstone’s The Chemical Life. People usually start taking anti-depressants or anxiety-related medications to treat a psychological condition, and some of these conditions are explored in the poems. Nevertheless, the ambiguous recreational implications, that is, drugs’ pains and pleasures, are boldly and courageously explored as well. Connections with the similar experiences of Coleridge, De Quincey and Baudelaire are acknowledged, though Johnstone’s perspective is both more disorientating and more lucid, too. The use of drugs and the consequent addiction have lost the romantic aura of the previous writers and poets; they are sometimes unavoidable and at other times intentionally pursued, but they alter the state of mind of the subjects. The effects are closely observed, never judged and always soberly presented.
Johnstone, a Toronto-based poet, is a poetry magazine editor and curator of Anstruther Books, and this is his fifth collection. He is also the editor of The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry, published in 2019. The themes and language of this collection testify to his experience and his skilful poetry writing. The prosody brilliantly reflects the disruptive consequences of drug dependence, as well as the possibilities that arise from it, and its sometimes devastating aftermaths. There is a ‘negative knowledge,’ expressed in W.H. Auden’s quotation in the dedication, that needs to be explored. It is as interesting as any other kind of knowledge and may be part of being human: |