Discoveries by Being: a review of Sojourns, by John Drudge

Barrio Blues Press. Chicago, IL. 2024. $14.99 paper, $6.99 Kindle

Review by Peter Mladinic

Just as there is a sojourn in time and space, there is also a sojourn across and down the page. Each poem is a sojourn of explorations and findings in language; each poem is a place in the imagination. In the first half of the twentieth century, the poet William Carlos Williams said, “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow …” What depends is the reader’s being alive enough to perceive the poem.  In Sojourners, where I am merges with who I am. The reader travels vicariously, taken into the poem / place by the poet’s manipulation of devices of sight, sense, and sound.

The second half of the Williams poem is an image. Images are key to an appreciation of Drudge’s poems. In “A Poet’s Breakfast,” he sets the scene with details of place: “coast, Boulevard, market boardwalk, Hotel.” The poet “ordered toast / and eggs and a drink.”

The detail of a lit cigarette prepares readers for the revelation of “Expelling the burden / of past deeds and future fears,” a letting go and being in the moment “back in France.”  In the next moment he “began to write.” The scene is often a panorama, a big picture with significant details. “Paris in Transition,” with its tone of familiarity is a good example. Its initial images are ones a traveler might see on the outskirts of any city. And then “you see the Eiffel in the distance / and the bridges / and the river.” The revelation of Paris made striking by the poet’s manipulation of what he shows and tells, culminating in the revelation that “This is Paris / And you are never the same again.” While numerous poems in Sojourners have narrative

elements  “Toy Boats,” set “In the Luxembourg gardens” is contemplative. A toy boat on a pond leads to a memory which, in turn, leads to a revelation. 

I longed for her
To come to me 
Like a faint wind 
Gently rocking 
The loan toy boat 
Marooned on the pond

Just as the wind rocks the boat, breath enables the speaker to long “for her” as he sits in the gardens “Beneath the chestnut trees.”

Manipulating sounds, the poet manipulates silence. There’s a lot of silence in “Drifting,” the book’s opening poem. The voice is as quiet as “the marsh.”  The rhythms, with their pauses, seem like halting steps: “In the clearing / With the day breaking / wishes on rocks / In the creek / In the distance.” This quiet chant is broken by the line “Turn up the volume.” The speaker is telling himself, here at the start of his sojourn, to give words to his “Wandering thoughts.” As a reader might assume from the title “The Road to Monaco” is about driving. Rhythm is involved. The sense of this road poem lies in its variation of sound, and in its silences. The road (this review traveled by tour bus) is steep and winding “Perched above the deep blue / Of the Mediterranean.” The speaker’s sense of driving this road is evoked in the poem’s rhythms:

And the heat 
From the summer road
Wrapping around 
The little convertible 
Bone dry and glove like
The grip

The variation in sound and rhythm is striking. The heat subtly, impressionistically wraps around “the little convertible;” then, the spondees of the one-syllable words evoke the not-so-subtle, but rather emphatic, tightened grip on the steering wheel, and the driver’s exhilaration that concludes the poem: “The faster / The better.”

The meanings of the poems are often rendered in metaphors. “Harry’s Bar” is set in a panorama that consists of “the lagoon / narrow walkways / bridges / canals / another night in Venice.”  Then the speaker saw figuratively “beyond eternity / And fell deeper in love / With you.” “Gargoyles” are a key image in “Spout.” These gargoyles “Aloof over Paris” protect, warn, and serve as water spouts. They stare 

Into tomorrow 
Over the grayness 
Of a near 
November sky 
Moving 
Toward the razor’s edge 
Of a shaky horizon
Where things 
Often go badly
And grief is just love
With nowhere left
To go

While the words “near, razor’s edge, and shaky” accent the “greyness,” the word “Where” connotes a place for things that “Often go badly” and also for “grief” in apposition with ” love” that has figuratively reached a dead end, that love within the sojourner who has “nowhere left to go.” It’s a memorable end, and a revelatory view of grief, a discovery in Paris and within the speaker’s emotional landscape. In “River,” the landscape is a rainforest; the speaker is in a boat that is “Passing at a good clip,” “With the river rushing / Against my fingers / As I breathe / The hot damp air / Of immediacy.”  This journey is as visceral as any journey can be. The immediacy is both the speaker’s and the reader’s. The reader, a vicarious traveler is on that river when “We shore the canoes,” accompanying the speaker on his trek through the dense foliage. At the end of “Windows,” the reader comes to “A dreamscape / Of long shadows” that lead to “windows / That look into us / As we pass through / each other.”  Metaphorically the speaker journeys through the listener, and the listener journeys through the speaker. In all these poems, the outer landscape mirrors the inner.

Sojourns is set in many different landscapes, from cites such as Paris, London, Lisbon, Rome, and Los Angeles, to meadows, fields, and places as an ancient as Stonehenge. In many of the poems the speaker remembers things, people, and places from his past.  In all of the poems he captures moments. “The Look” begins: “She lay stretched out / in the sand.” The setting is a cove, “by the sea.” 

She stirred 
And looked up at him
Watching her
And smiled a smile 
That sent him
Somewhere deep 
Beyond the day

Sojourns is the book, and the bridge between the poet and his audience is language carefully crafted and for elegance never missing a beat. Sojourns is poems about places and people, a one-of-a-kind book of good, and often profound poems.

BIO

Peter Mladinic’s most recent book of poems, The Whitestone Bridge is available from Anxiety Press. An animal rights advocate, he lives in Hobbs, New Mexico, US.