Stella Johnston's poems in Without a Witness invite the reader into widely different places, from the nightmarish landscape of a morphine hallucination, to the last few moments of a Gary Cooper western, to the bedside of a dying Roman emperor in a field tent in Persia. The acute perception -- whether one of pain, joy, grief, remorse, or relief -- figures in every poem's attempt to hold onto something essential. At times, moments of loss become almost indistinguishable from moments of enlightenment; even terrible cruelty turns into the ironic counterpart to knowledge by which something, after...

Stella Johnston's poems in Without a Witness invite the reader into widely different places, from the nightmarish landscape of a morphine hallucination, to the last few moments of a Gary Cooper western, to the bedside of a dying Roman emperor in a field tent in Persia. The acute perception-whether one of pain, joy, grief, remorse, or relief-figures in every poem's attempt to hold onto something essential. At times, moments of loss become almost indistinguishable from moments of enlightenment; even terrible cruelty turns into the ironic counterpart to knowledge by which something, after all,...