Fred Johnston

Life

1951- ; b.27 Sept., Belfast; ed., St. Thomas Aquinas, Toronto, Canada, St. Joseph’s, Belfast, and St. Malachy’s College, Belfast, where he was taught by Des Wilson; worked in several years in public relations; journalist on Evening Press, Belfast Telegraph, and other papers, 1968-78; winner of Hennessy Literary Award, 1972; with Peter Sheridan and Neil Jordan, co-founded, Irish Writers’ Co-operative; settled in Galway in c.1986, and helped fnd. Cúirt Literature Festival there; contrib. reviews to Southern Humanities Review, The Irish Times, and Harpers’ & Queens; fnd. The Western Writers, Centre/Ionad Scríbhneoirí Chaitlín Maude in Galway;

served as poetry reviewer for Poetry Ireland and later for Books Ireland; contrib. to Orbis, New Letters, The Southern Review, and The Seneca Review; issued Songs for Harp Accompaniment (1996), poems; issued True North (1997); a collection, Middle (1997), was planned with Salmon for in 1997; Keeping the Night Watch (1999), stories; issued Atalanta: A Novel (2000); lectures at Hewitt Summer School, 2003; frequent poetry reviews in Books Ireland; issued Keeping the Night Watch (q.d.); No Earthly Pole (Punchbag Th., Galway Arts Fest. [1998]) recipient of NI Arts Council and Irish Arts Council bursaries; winner of Prix de l’Ambassade, 2000 to translate Michel Martin;

also trans. the Senegalese poet Babacar Sall; has served on the Executive of the Irish Writers’ Union; issued Mapping God (2003), a novel that departs from the discovery of a young girl’s body on the Irish sea-board; recipient of the Ireland Fund of Monaco Literary Bursary at the Princess Grace Irish Library, Sept.-Oct. 2004; fnd.-manager of Western Writers’ Centre; issued The Oracle Room (2007), poems often treating of an abusive and secretive Ireland; forthcoming, The Neon Rose (2007), a murder mystery set in Paris; issued Dancing in the Asylum (2011), short stories; directes Western Writers’ Centre, Galway; Sylvia Crawford is his partner.

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Works

Poetry

Life and Death in The Midlands ([Dublin:] Tansy Books 1979), 50pp.
A Scarce Light (Beaver Row Press 1985).
Song At The Edge of The World (Salmon Publishing 1987).
Measuring Angles (Cló Iar-Chonnachta 1993) [book & cassette].
Browne [rev. edn.] (Belfast: Lapwing Publ. 1993), 25pp.
True North (Keneven: Salmon Publ. 1997), 85pp.
Being Anywhere: New & Selected Poems (Belfast: Lagan Press, 2001), xvi, 92pp.
Measuring Angles [The Artist’s Voice Series] (Cló Iar-Chonnachta 1993), 79pp. [with cassette].
Paris Without Maps (Dingwall: Sandstone Press for Northwords 2003), 28pp.
The Oracle Room (Cinnamon Press 2007), 96pp.

Fiction

Picture of a Girl in a Spanish Hat ([Dublin:] Tansy Books 1979), stories.
Keeping the Night Watch ([London:] Collins Press 1998), 172pp.
Atalanta: A Novel (Collins Press 2000), 216pp.
Mapping God/Le Tracé de Dieu (Wynkin de worde 2003), 262pp. [bilingual on facing pages].
Dancing in the Asylum (Parthian 2011).

Contributions [sel.]

“Shooting Magpies”, in Poetry Ireland Review, 42 (1994), p.81.
“Shop Street, Winter Morning”, “Bogeymen”, in Honest Ulsterman, 98 (1994), p.35-36.
“Pizza”, “Ballyvaughan”, “Night Driving”, in Irish Studies Review (Summer 1994), p.18.
“Dancing in the Asylum”, poem in Times Literary Supplement (25 Sept. 1998), p.7.
“The Old Colonials, i.m. Frederick Harvey Johnston”, in Irish Studies Review (Autumn 1996), p.23 [full page].

Reviews [sel.]

‘Poetry, Poets and the Power of healing’, in The Irish Times (7 Nov. 1998) [“Poetry Now” column].
‘Guid as Gold’, feature review of Patricia Craig, The Belfast Anthology (Belfast: Blackstaff 1999), in Books Ireland (March 2000), p.61 [see extract].
review of Paul Durcan, Cries of an Irish Caveman: New Poems, in Books Ireland (Feb. 2002) [q.pp.].
review of Sruth Teangacha/Stream of Tongues, in Books Ireland (Oct. 2002), p.247 [see extract]; review of Crystal Clear: Collected Essays of John Jordan, ed. Hugh McFadden], in The Irish Book Review (Summer 2006), p.7 [see under Jordan - infra].
Fred Johnston, review of Playbook, in Books Ireland Feb. (2020) [see under Scully - infra].

On YouTube ..

Other links

—Searching ”Fred Johnston” on YouTube - online [accessed 15.05.2014].

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Commentary
Derek Hand, reviewing Atalanta (Collins Press), in The Irish Times (4 Nov. 2000), recounts a plot in which young man tells his story of artistic blossoming [in] lush, dreamlike prose as he makes transition from innocence to experience, childhood to adulthood; Atalanta of the title is a recently-widowed woman who opens up a whole new world of feeling and sensation for the narrator, her name - and that of the novel - being taken from a Handel opera.

Maurice Harmon, review of Mapping God, in Books Ireland (Nov. 2003): bilingual publication on facing pages; concerns Fr Dermody a corrupt priest in a brutal climate who kills the malefactor in a case of a murdered girl, found naked on a beach; characters incl. Patsy Joe, story teller; English major, Italian ice-cream vendor; praise for descriptive power; village on the edge of the world; quotes, ‘Innocence has gone out of this place’[ top ]

Giles Newington, notice on Dancing in the Asylum, in The Irish Times (14 Jan. 2012), Weekend, p.13: ”The title story that opens Fred Johnston’s first collection [sic] sets, the mood, as the alcoholic Pritchard loses everything - marriage, mMarbles and means of support - before finding a hallucinatory kind of refuge down a corridor of the mental hospital where he has ended up. Pritchard’s tone, dyspeptic but vulnerable, is typical of Johnston’s protagonism, most of whom feet like outsiders in the unnamed Irish towns whose intrigues and atmospheres oppress them. [...] Johnston [...] has a tendency to resolve the situations he sets up with dreamlike poetic flourishes, which can seem, evasive. His material, though, is interestingly varied - from a single mother moving into an empty estate to a would-be novelist paying for friendship to an uneasy gay encounter at a carnival - and, at its best, expressive of a distinctive and dissenting point of view.’

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Quotations
“Homeric”: ‘When I came out of Louisburg / Under the murmur of the holy mountain / I lost the story I’d heard. // The radio blared a daftness / About taxi-fares in Dublin: there / Was murder in Bethlehem. // It always rained against the window / Of the classroom in Louisburg: abrupt, / Shocking, a bright sun. ?/ Deep bright too the bay folding / Colour over colour of the ocean sky / My blind radio singing the world.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 2 Aug. 2002, p.22.)

—In The Irish Times (23 April 2016) - online.

Note: The Irish Times version appeared without stanza breaks contrary to the poet’s intentions as notice by the poet on Facebook [23.04.2016].

“Algiers”: a new poem by Fred Johnston

What I can remember are taxis and a long walk by the docks
smell of oil and tar and fish-stalls by the mosque -
where were you, daughter, who crept out in photographs?

Those white buildings, white as blind eyes, and the casbah
with its deceit of lanes and entrances; and a donkey
for no reason still as held breath in the middle of the street

Where were you in all of this, can you remember for me?
I needed cheap wine and pills to keep me buoyant
someone to read the street-maps, take care of us both

Invisible to myself, was I invisible to you? Dust and blue sea,
afternoons heavy and viscous as poured concrete -
rank wine in the teeth and a tongue burnt by black tobacco

Postcards that told lies, I wrote them in the old French rooms
needing witnesses, the post-box became a confessional -
we’re as out of touch now as then, images with their colours bled

Out, we may as well not have existed. Algiers did that
and the other places, exotic or plain,
I doubt we trailed a decent shadow through all that light.

New Statesman (15 May 2016); posted by the poet on Facebook, 25.05.2018.

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“New Order”

I enter a new order of things
learn the language of blood-tests, platelets,
reticulocytes, an Absolute Neutrophil Count,
lymphocytes, even the chance, however remote,
of Rocky Mountain spotted fever -
somehow I am in that zone where blood will out
where all things are fatal until proven innocent.

How did I stumble here, when did the colossus
yield to sand, where was I when the Sphinx
moved a blasted paw under my feet
and I went face-down into a deceit of years?

When did the heart fail the rose, I didn’t see that
coming; with my skull in the MRI scan’s pulsing
sheath, what verses did I compose to its beat?
It’s a shock, I tell you, to become like everyone else
to be human, frail as God, ordinary as grass
collapsing inward, drying up, unheroic, alarmed.

See ...

Carol Rumens, Poem of the Week: “New Order” by Fred Johnston, in The Guardian ((10 June 2019)

A short group of poems concerning what the poet has described as a “cancer scare” opens Fred Johnston’s wide-ranging new collection, Rogue States. He goes on to explore many aspects of the “rogue state” beyond that of the cellular rebellions of the body. Even the title of this week’s poem, New Order, summons political associations, particularly of the rightwing kind; the reference to “that zone / where blood will out” may further the allusion.

One of the reasons this particular poem attracted me is because it asks such a pertinent and difficult question about poetry and experience. Some poets would say that anything could be faced as long as they could write about it. Falling sick would be an unhappy experience but it might coexist with, and even feed, the passion to write about it. But to be sapped of the energy to translate the illness into the writer’s native language would intensify the experience unbearably.

“New Order” is frank about this. Initially, the speaker finds poetic pleasure where he can, appropriating - or misappropriating - the authentic, melodic new language of pathology, inviting it to enrich the word hoard. (You can check out Absolute Neutrophil Count here and all you might or might not want to know about blood in general is here.) The verbal procedure seems to climax in graveyard humour about a nonexistent disease, listing “even the chance, however remote / of Rocky Mountain spotted fever”, but it turns out that such a fever, tick-borne, really exists - and may be a killer. At the end of the stanza, a smudge of the “habeas corpus” rule marks and gently mocks the scientific method “where all things are fatal until proven innocent”.

A dramatic inner quatrain, forged from three, not wholly rhetorical questions encompasses an expanse of historical decay. It’s as if Ozymandias lamented the dust pile he has become. No subtle, riddling Sphinx trips up the protagonist: this monster, in a powerful, brutal image simply has to shift an already “blasted paw”. The phrase “deceit of years” is interesting: it suggests a delusion about the abundance of years imagined by an individual for themselves, and, perhaps, that all years will amount to nothing but sand grains. The word “deceit” has the hiss of sand in it.

If Shelley hovers here, in the next stanza we meet the shadow of William Blake. There’s a brilliant mix of registers in the opening line-and-a-bit, sharpened by a well-judged line break: “When did the heart fail the rose, I didn’t see that / coming ...” Refusing to reach a point of reconciliation, the speaker goes on to chart a graceless fall from the artist’s special status. He may have felt godlike once, but “God” is only another set of frail human responses to human frailty. Self-mockery crinkles the edges of the downfall, perhaps: “It’s a shock, I tell you, to become like everyone else.” The speaker seems to be joking but, again, he may merely be speaking the truth.

The artist’s temptation is usually to dramatise his or her downfall, but grandiosity is refused by Johnston as he works through that final descent to halt on the throbbing ordinariness of the last word, “alarm”. As Hannah Arendt said of evil, illness is banal but to respond to it without being demolished by the banality is a triumph.

Available online; see copy - as attached; accessed 11.06..2019.

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“In the Plague Year”

What does it matter the hurricane force of water
Drowning the cars parked on the warned-off seafront
Degrees of force running through yellow to red amount
To nothing with the drunk youngsters drunken laughter
In waves pulsing out of the pubs warm in windowlight
The young cannot die by storm, but yet they do
By the sudden petulant knife and on camera too
In the doors of take-aways and often just from spite
The girls take off their shoes and lose their ’phones
What does it matter that their feet are soaking wet
And a coughing sickness is at the gates; regret
Is not their game, theirs is the solid fuck-off-ness of stones
The country sinks and surfaces and sinks to mud
There are sad lines of cattle cowering under hedges
The photos up on Facebook show the sodden edges
Where some farmer’s boundary walls are under flood
The News at Ten reports on a banished foreign town
Where tourists skulk in masks like terrorists
Or surgeons and every border has a group of men with lists
Scribing personal details, destinations, getting it all down
But here on the table-end of the world the white tide
Is worry enough, and the salted blow along the promenade
And whether the car will start and where’s the keys I had
In the pub a moment ago or are they still on the bar inside?

—Posted by Fred Johnston on Facebook - 29.02.2020; online; accessed 29.02.2020.

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Kith & Kin: reviewing The Best of Francis Ledwidge, ed., Liam O’Meara, in Books Ireland (Summer 2005), Fred Johnston writes: ‘Every 11 November my late Dublin aunt would haul my cousin and me over to the Garden of Remembrace at Kilmainham and there we’d honour the Irishmen who’d fallen in the Great War. I mostly recalled, even then, my grand-uncle Paddy, a merry dapper Dubliner, so ruinged by shell-shock, even with his medals, that he would often be found cowering out in our Ballybough garden shed, avoiding God knows what horrors. And this fifty years after the Great War ended. […] It is not the least ironic that that, while my Dubliner Catholic grand uncle was being blown out of his gun-carriage on the Western Front, my staunchly Unionist and Protestant Belfast grandfather was being blown out of his Royal Navy destroyer near Scapa Floe.’

PGIL Interview (Autumn 2004): ‘I write about small things, small thoughts, my self-consciousness and anxiety in the world, my anger at unfairness and political double-think, rediscovering family, loves, regrets – the bits and pieces that float up to the shores of the heart and soul regardless of how much we try to hold back the tide or keep the beach clean. Always the hope is that someone may see a poem as a mirror of something they are experiencing themselves and react to it, take it in. You can ask little more. Poets speak and record ordinary life and endow their reworking of the ordinary with another sense, another dimension, if you like. But they – and I, most definitely – are not always successful. That’s why pomposity or the notion of ambition in poetry – rabidly prevalent among, sadly, younger practitioners – is ludicrous. To imagine that your thoughts are holier, more sacred than someone else’s! You do a small job with a poem, but if you do it well and someone likes it, that’s what your whole achievement is.’ (For full interview, see infra.)

Letter to The Irish Times on the Irish Arts Council subventions budget to Irish publishing houses, 2014.

Sir, - I do not represent the O’Brien Press, nor am I attempting to speak for it. Nonetheless, as a writer, I was astounded to learn (December 5th) that the Arts Council had reduced grant aid to this publisher by a whopping 84 per cent. Now correct me if I am wrong, but is this the same council that has had a hand in initiating the very first Irish fiction laureateship? Do they not do irony in Merrion Square?
For more than four decades, the O’Brien Press has been a leading Irish publisher of poetry, fiction and children’s books. It does not need me to sing its praises or trumpet its achievements. But no doubt the Arts Council would wish to be praised for its own mighty work in highlighting Ireland’s literary profile.
The council has exercised a “scorched earth” policy concerning literature for quite some time, reducing or killing off even the most modest of grants to literature festivals, scuppering the hopes of small but energetic publishers.
The grant to the O’Brien Press should be restored to what it was formerly and as soon as possible. The reduction of the grant is as disgraceful as it is inexplicable. One might wonder yet again whether the council is not merely interested in an exportable cultural image rather than the promotion of literature. This latest Merrion Square fiasco makes an utter nonsense of the much-heralded, God help us, Irish fiction laureateship.

- Yours, &,

Fred Johnston,
Galway.

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References
Books in Print (1994), Life and Death in The Midlands (Tansy Books 1979); A Scarce Light (Beaver Row Press 1985) [0 94630 835 7]; Song At The Edge of The World (Galway: Salmon Publishing 1988) [0 948339 12 8]; Measuring Angles (Galway: Cló Iar-Chonnachta 1993) [1 874700 11 7]; Browne (Belfast: Lapwing Publ. 1993) [1 898472 06 8].

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Notes
Mapping God (2003) centres on the finding of young girl’s body in an Irish coastal village. Brian the barman, the priest, Father Dermody, and the disturbing character who was most closely involved with the young girl are all suspected. Other chars. are the Barton family, with set apart from the villagers by their privileged lives; the Major; Guido, the immigrant; Manny, the old woman with a hippy lifestyle; local policeman and the detective drafted in; a young reporter drawn into the dark secrets of the village. The novel has a a gripping story-line and a dénouement of startling complexity; its language is infused with imagery. (See Irish Emigrant, “Book of the Week”, 31 Oct. 2004).

Dancing in the Asylum (2011) - themes and characters incl. : Paying for friendship, angry knicker-flashing at ex-pats, gay cruising at a medieval carnival ... funny, occasionally grotesque, always poignant, these pieces paint a wonderfully unexpected portrait of a place and its people in a time of great change, each page unfolding a delicate or deliciously devious secret. (See Waterstones, online; accessed 23.02.2012.)

P. J. Kavanagh? Fred Johnston, ‘Guid as Gold’, review of Patricia Craig, The Belfast Anthology (Blackstaff 2000), in Books Ireland, March 2000, pp.61-62; incls. account of his own purchase of a ,first typewriter for seven quid’ at P. J. Kavanagh’s I Buy Anything store.

Good read: Fred Johnston is a favourite poet of Jack Taylor, the ex-Garda hero of Ken Bruen’s detective novels. (Books Ireland, Summer 2004, p.161.)

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