"A remarkable piece of historical detective work and an engaging story, Mitchell's account offers valuable information for others pursuing genealogical questions."—Publishers Weekly
"Roger Mitchell writes with a poet's eye for exact detail in his absorbing book about his search for Israel Johnson—a ghostly presence who comes to haunt the reader as much as he did the author. Written with all the passion of an autobiography, Clear Pond might easily be thought of as a detective story in which the detective discovers himself at the center of a seeming crime. For the author's investigations lay bare the poet himself, Roger Mitchell, whose obsession becomes ours as well as his. It's a lovely book, richly layered and beautifully written."—Jay Parini , author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year
Description
This is the story of poet Roger Mitchell’s unique and intriguing search through more than a century of historical threads, looking for “a simple, singular man.” The ostensible subject of his inquiry, one Israel Johnson, was a nineteenth-century pioneer settler who lived deep in the Adirondack wilderness. Despite having developed patents for a type of sawmill that remained in use well into the twentieth century, which could have made him rich, Johnson was “no one in particular,” an everyman who died penniless, very nearly lost in the mists of time.
Roger Mitchell’s painstaking search to reconstruct Johnson’s life led into people’s homes and family memories, into countless libraries, courthouses, and graveyards, into the National Archives, and far more. The story here is of
the finding, as much as it is of the found. And the acts by which it was accomplished have the reassuring and preserving quality of memory, both individual and collective. The story of Clear Pond puts a small island in the scream of time; and while it certainly does not stop time, it makes time go around it.
About the Author
Roger Mitchell was the director of the MFA program at Indiana University. He is the author of nine books of poetry including Lemon Peeled The Moment Before: New and Selected Poems: 1967-2008 and Delicate Bait. His awards include the Midland Poetry Prize, the John Ben Snow Award and the Akron Prize in Poetry.
Series: New York State and Regional studies
6 x 9, 240 pages, 22 black and white illustrations, 3 maps
June 1991