Gordon Johnston

Durable Goods Gordon Johnston

Durable Goods, poem by poem, finds lasting value in ordinary daily acts and objects -- shaving with an inherited safety razor, packing a backpack for a wilderness trek, listening to Neal Young on a cassette worn to the brink of uselessness, answering a toddler daughter's questions about air. There are letter poems to writer friends composed along trails in the Rockies, appreciations of the crooked, eternally unraveling beauties of river rapids and of the canoes that cooperate with them. By turns boyish and battle-scarred -- "For forty years," one poems says, "I have been fifteen" -- the voice is this collection is that of a man listening to his life, leaning toward whatever durable good he can come across next.