[In the following review, McGuiness offers a positive assessment of The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly.]

The Man among the Seals and Inner Weather are so rare, you'll never find them. The Incognito Lounge and The Veil? The spines are so cracked and the pages so overrun with scribbling they defy reading and take their place on the shelf as artifacts. So we need this collection [The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly] from Denis Johnson. It's a hefty reminder that he spent a long time as a poet, before he became one of our more important novelists, before he became a short-story writer without peer, before he became a foreign correspondent. He's an inverse Hemingway of the visionary, going to real wars now after the interior wars have been won. Remember? “Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson, / and I am almost ready to / confess it is not some awful misunderstanding that has carried / me here, my arms full of the ghosts / of flowers, to kneel at your feet … My coat / is leprosy and my dagger is a lie; must I shed them? … I am here at the waters / because in this space between spaces where nothing speaks, / I am what it says.”

There are a few new poems here but they seem tentative, like he's warming up for something that will surprise him and us. How about a long poem, resolving the voice that journalism gives him with the interior urgings of those early lyrics? One of the new poems is called “Ulysses”: “The hull of the knife and the surf / of our hurting // The outrigger of the bullet and the whitecaps / of our mistakes // The Commander of Suicide / and the archipelago / of the mirror.” Look at all the room in there.

The modernists couldn't write an epic without God. Johnson has looked at salvation from all sides, has no terror of the infinite.