A Ride Through Faerie & Other Poems is Clay Franklin Johnson’s debut collection of poetry in honor of John Keats on the bicentennial year of his tragic death in 1821. Clay’s poems, influenced by the darker side of Romanticism, capture atmospheres of nightmarish dreamscapes, often easing broodingly into “night-worlds” of otherworldly beauty, painting phantasmal scenes of visionary imagery, vivid with wondrous landscapes of the supernatural sublime, alive with “night-creatures” that exist in duality between dark and light, between death and life, and between this world and what waits on the other side.
Clay’s poetry is obsessive, haunted by phantasms, ghosts of guilt, regret, longing, memories of lost loved ones, and possesses a particular penchant for that brooding, melancholy aesthetic of Gothic literature. The collection was passionately inspired by place and landscape, and includes poems of night-wandering despair among the Gothic ruins of Whitby Abbey; a piece of macabre decadence and dark fantasy written in Edinburgh; an elegy on both the funereal and Faerie-esque beauty of Keats’s grave in Rome; and a narrative poem based on the faery Mélusine that was inspired by a Shelleyan sort of illusion upon the enchanted waters of Asturian seas.
The illustrations are by artist Eli John who has brought brilliant visual artwork to Clay’s poetry, capturing haunting atmospheres and night-worlds in poems such as “Lines Written by Moonlight at Whitby Abbey,” “The Fires of Ecstasy at Samhuinn,” “My Little Green Secret,” and “Edinburgh Ecstasies.”
