To Catch A Falling Knife

Daniel Johnson’s poetry book, To Catch a Falling Knife, takes a different approach to any situation. He has an obvious dark perspective to the poems he writes. A common theme to weave through his work is destruction. In the poem, Accounting for the Wren, the Rocket, and immaterial, it speaks of how the “ vapor trail vanished: the absence of geese: a gaping/ space where before there was none./ Begin again the slow loss” (Johnson 3). This is a subdued description for Johnson. In the poem, My father, The Small Town Sadist, He describes how “a tin pail of teeth hangs/ from the handlebars of his bike” (11) and how the teeth were clicking together in the bucket as his father rode along. Johnson has spectacular imagery in his poems. For example, in Her Body is a White Thing in the Sun Now, he describes “her hair is a nest of frost (her mouth/ a hole for mice or a post)” (24). He creates this vision
His piece Errata, is a harder poem to follow. The poem starts with a heart racing phone call, then goes to a deer nipping outside a missile site, then the years of animals, and finally his family becoming a bucket of teeth.
Johnson is not a weak poet, but he is not strong either. Some poems are stronger than others making it range a bit. On a scale of one to ten, he would fall around a six or seven. Some of the stronger poems are lovely, in a weird twisted way, because so is his writing style. Some of the poems are so raw though, the poem the book was named for, To Catch a Falling Knife, has the most spirit and open meaning that is not twisted in some way. It just opens the mind to what a person could do.
This poet would be outstanding to recommend to someone who would like to read something different and on the complex side. Though some of his work is dark, awkward, or abstract his voice shines through and it is new and open for interpretation and can give a voice to almost many