Deborah L. Fruchey

“It was the summer of 1961,” 
Mom said.

“He was speaking out against the war.

People were noticing him.

The wrong people.

I asked him to stop.

I begged him to stop.

But he wouldn’t listen to me.”

Loie Johnson's poetry is spare and magical. Her debut volume of poetry, Sacred Hours, Common Acts, often describes the natural and urban worlds in the colors of a painter. It is spiritual without being preachy, with an Eastern influence that doesn't veer into Orientalism. Johnson makes good use of open field; the placement of words on the page are important to this visual thinker. Her imagination is historical. She is an accomplished wordsmith with a light hand who is deep without ever being ponderous. Her skillfully crafted poems are a delight to read and to reread.

        —Jan Steckel, Author of The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist             Press, 2011) Winner of the         Lambda Literary Award

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Hardback, 7X10 inches, 30 pages. Photos by the author.

This collection is a continuation of coast poems begun with The Nearest Place Distant, and I’m promising more after this. There’s just something about Oregon’s westmost land that won’t let you go home. But California’s northern coast is also a part of this book and the area surrounding Eureka is fascinating — a place where history vies with a time before history. Humboldt Bay is like a giant lagoon, and the lagoons north of town are completely enchanting. This book features a long piece about Oregon’s famous Cannon Beach.  I wrote about it from the standpoint of age thirteen, when I first beheld it.  I wanted to capture the wonder I felt arriving at that amazing expanse of shore that owes its unusual width to silt from the Columbia River.  And, as I’ve expressed elsewhere, Cannon Beach and the entire littoral it is a part of, for me, truly became an obsession…only hypnosis might make it stop! BUY YOUR COPY HERE!

Daphne Rose was a personal friend and a fine poet whom life never allowed to pursue her creative dreams. I have waited 40 years to publish these poems!  

The poems left to us all date to before 1986; tragically, her later work is lost. However even in these early poems the poet comes through strongly: a wordsmith with an incisive voice, gifted with the ability for flawless iambic pentameter, which she wrote as easily as breathing. Blasphemous, dramatic, unstinting.

Daphne suffered from Long COVID in her later years and was not able to gather her mature work into a manuscript. But what is left to us is a fine legacy of a strong writer and woman.

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