A Metaphorical God
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Persea Books, 2008
“She’s a polyphonic prestidigitator, a virtuoso of the vibrant heart, and — stunning in our fallen world — a genuine metaphysician, with all the healing aptitude the word implies.”
— Linda Gregerson
“Dazzling….She writes with Milton open at her elbow but with the real dirt of a real Utah under her fingertips.”
— The Yale Review
Read a review of A Metaphorical God in the Virginia Quarterly Review.
Read a review of A Metaphorical God in Michigan Quarterly Review.
Excerpts from A Metaphorical God
Fond romantic, I’ve followed the map farther
than asphalt, taken myself up to the bare
coordinates where the compass rose blooms.
I’m quick to see the cartographer’s flourish
as a valentine, quicker to want what beauty
forced its mark here, to lose my bearings by it:
let my north be this rosy seduction
of sandstone flashed with quartz, my east that far, high mountain
shining like all the kingdoms of the world.
(from “Three Bouquets”)
Spring begins in a fatness of front lawns,
but not mine. I whose blowtorch urge approaches
the ascetic, whose resolve to bury
luxuriance grows raw-handed from shoveling,
have duly torched and shoveled grass until
the baked blades crumpled like old palm fronds
and their upturned roots drooped.
(from “Ash Garden”)
"Dazzling ... She writes with Milton open at her elbow but with the real dirt of a real Utah under her fingertips."
— The Yale Review
"It is a beautiful book, and an unusual one ... Its remarkable lucidity, its seductive energy, its lushness, and its music form a vision in which the real and the transcendental are indistinguishable."
— Mark Strand
"Kimberly Johnson's superbly colourful, rhythmic and readable new translation...finds a way of feeding the Virgilian strain of English verse – from Milton to Wordsworth and beyond – back into her lines." — The Independent (UK)