My Heart Remembers

from the foreword by Anna Mundow

"If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all," John Keats declares in a letter to a friend in 1818. And Dorothy Johnson, writing a little over two hundred years later, has reached the same conclusion.

"I cannot force a poem/like an amaryllis/in a pot . . . ," she observes in one of the many gems that make up this collection. A stray thought or memory, a change in the weather, a recent death, an ancient myth-any one of ...