The extraordinary ordinary

How George Johnston became one of Canada's great forgotten poets

- ZAK BLACK

"The Essential George Johnston" is one of the more recent collections of the neglected poet's work.

George Johnston is Canada’s great forgotten poet of everyday life. He spent his career getting the familiar onto paper — as George Orwell once described James Joyce’s great achievement — and into verse. Yet Johnston’s triumphs have come and gone almost as quietly as the everyday happenings recounted in his poems.

Johnston’s first book of poetry, “The Cruising Auk” (1959), was well-received by the likes of Margaret Atwood, who called it “poetic enough to delight even the most literate of the literati, and hilarious enough to soothe the most bookshy quarterback to a charming diffidence,” and Northrop Frye, who called Johnston “an irresistibly readable and quotable poet.”

Johnston, who died nearly 20 years ago at age 90, followed up “The Cruising Auk” with five more books of original poetry, including “Home Free” (1966) and “Taking a Grip” (1978). In 1987, an issue of The Malahat Review was dedicated to his work. But, by 1992, the literary critic W.J. Keith was already complaining that Johnston had been more or less neglected for the past two decades. By the time of Johnston’s death in 2004, a Globe and Mail memorial described him as “virtually unknown in Canada.”

Unknown, perhaps, but not unhappy. By all accounts, Johnston had many good friends, a large and loving family, and a successful teaching career at Carleton University in Ottawa. He was also admired by fellow poets, including P.K. Page, who said his poems were as casual as neighbours’ talk but as intricate as lace. Johnston was also a wellregarded translator of Icelandic sagas (including the excellent “Saga of Gisli”), which commemorate heroic adventures and extraordinary deeds.