New Zealand Writers

JOHNSTON, Andrew

Johnston writes with a finely judged sense of poetic presence and occasion.

• From The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature
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Author entry from The Oxford Companion to New Zealand Literature, edited by Roger Robinson and Nelson Wattie (1998). About the Companion entries View list of Companion contributors

JOHNSTON, Andrew (1963– ), poet and editor, won the New Zealand Book Award for Poetry with his first volume, How to Talk (1993). Born in Upper Hutt, he was editor of the books page of the Evening Post 1991–96. His poems have been published in *Meanjin and Scripsi in Australia, London Magazine and Verse in UK and *Sport and elsewhere in New Zealand. He received the Louis Johnson New Writers Bursary in 1991. Associated with the Wellington school of *Manhire and *Bornholdt, Johnston writes with a finely judged sense of poetic presence and occasion, and in the first volume projects the image of the wryly detached conversationalist for whom poetry is essentially an art of communication. Emotion is manoevred into formal strategies designed for the poet–reader encounter: engaging, sustaining, then signing off, often with a punning touch—‘when I leave /I leave a lot to be desired’. Titles like ‘Haiku Beach’ and ‘The Poetry Inspector’ suggest the formal qualities of Johnston’s aesthetic: a willingness to let grammar provide guiding constraints; a fascination with the sound of the lyrical voice, a recognition of the artefact’s capacity to manipulate reality.

His second volume, The Sounds (1996), demonstrates the familiar linguistic poise, but is further distinguished by mastery of the elaborate sestina form, with its repeated line-endings and formally varied order. Johnston establishes a thematic dialogue with How to Talk, reviving his fascination with grammatical concepts in ‘Syntax’, playfully alluding to language’s appparent conquest of distance in ‘How to Walk’, ‘Wire’, and ringing the changes on seasons, spaces and communicative modes in several travel poems. Throughout, he speculates on the ambiguous nature of silence and sound: ‘What does sunlight sound like? / A white flower in darkness knows.’ Johnston received a Writers Bursary in 1994, and attended the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa as New Zealand representative in 1995. He is living as a journalist in London. JW

Updated information

Andrew Johnston's collection of poetry, Birds of Europe, was published in 2000.

In 2007, his fifth collection of poetry, Sol, was published (Victoria University Press). It illuminates with humour and curiosity, the ways we link language, loss, history and memory. At the heart of Sol are two major poems. ‘Les Baillessats’ is a relaxed, sun-filled poem to his newborn son. ‘The Sunflower’, an elegy for his father, is a technically dazzling double sestina, and a grave extended meditation on death, family and religious faith. Johnston has resided in France for a number of years, working as an editor for the International Herald Tribune. He i s the 2007 J.D. Stout Fellow at Victoria University, where he is writing a book about contemporary New Zealand poetry. He also edits The Page, an online digest of some of the Web’s best poems and essays.