Ronald Johnson. To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems of Ronald Johnson, edited with an introduction by Peter O'Leary. Jersey City, N.J.: Talisman, 2000. In his essay dedicated to young poets, Hurrah for Euphony, Ronald Johnson advises, Be an enthusiast. An enthusiast announces divine inspiration and is accused by the unenthused of having loitered too long in the temple, inhaled too much incense, drunk too much altar wine. Johnson's poems-- innovative lyrics that are at once songs and icons arranged in clusters like grapes in cornucopia -announce the natural world as our temple and the fleeting instant as sufficient for inspiration. Drawing from the lexicons of astronomy, meteorology, geology, botany, agriculture, biology, ornithology, painting, classical music, architecture, literature, mythology and etymology, he cross-cultivates these special idioms by taking words as Thoreau took up flowers, and as Whitman observed a spear of summer grass: what Johnson sees, he celebrates: he observes as one would a holiday, a holy day. WOR(L)DS was the first working title for what would become his masterpiece, his visionary epic ARK, the best exemplar in recent time of the poet observing the world in words. This new selection of his poetry from his seven previously published books-A Line of Poetry, A Row of Trees (1964), The Book of the Green Man (1967), The Different Musics (1969), Songs of the Earth (1970), Eyes & Objects (1976), RADI OS (1977), and ARK (1996) -as well as from the previously unpublished, posthumous work, The Shrubberies, makes his advice easy to follow and makes clear that his work has all along aimed at making us enthusiasts. Johnson is a religious poet, but of his own vision. In a helpful introduction to this selection, Peter O'Leary sets him in the company of Dante, Herbert, Smart, and Blake. While surely at home among these visionaries, Johnson joins the company in a way that is particularly American, Emersonian. Through formal and visionary revisions of others' poems, he seeks to be inimitable. He seeks for himself and fosters in others a kind of self-reliant regularity, as did Whitman and Dickinson, Williams and Zukofsky. Johnson's place in the visionary tradition is characterized by his borrowings from the larger European and biblical literary traditions as well as from the work of naturalists such as Palmer, Thoreau, Bartram, and Peterson. In his fondness for quotation, Johnson surely bears Pound's influence but without any sense of Pound's culture-baiting or crankiness. He borrows without discernable anxiety or irony. Like Montaigne, he seems to quote only in order to better himself. This, as Guy Davenport says of him in his afterword to the original edition of RADI OS, is invention in the original sense of the term, in the sense of Emerson's finding as founding and of Pound's it new, if to make it new is to make it one's own. Johnson's selective reading of Paradise Lost, for example-crossing and cutting out words to revise a wholly new poem out of the old-is a radical instance of what Emerson called creative reading. This is not deconstruction, but new creation. Similarly, in Beam 21, 22, 23 of ARK, reprinted here in its entirety, he takes lines from the Psalms to make what he calls PALMS, offering up a new song of singular inspiration from the traditional songs of the covenant. Thus, Johnson's project tries to make the reader realize the analogy between reading and vision, such that reading becomes a kind of spiritual practice for living enthusiastically. There is constant bridging between seeing the page and saying the words, a bridge analogous to reading the words and experiencing the world. From The Book of the Green Man: I threw a stone upon a pond & it bounded the surface, its circles interlacing & radiating out to the most ephemeral edge. …