Louis Albert Johnson (27 September 1924 Feilding, New Zealand – 1 November 1988) was a New Zealand poet.

Life

He graduated from Wellington Teachers’ Training College. From 1968 to 1980, Johnson lived overseas and traveled widely, with an extended stay in Papua New Guinea.^[1]

Johnson worked as a schoolteacher, journalist, and editor of several publications, including the New Zealand Poetry Yearbook (1951–64),^[2] Numbers (1954–60), and Antipodes New Writing (1987).^[3][4]

Awards

• 1975 New Zealand Book Award for poetry for Fires and Patterns
• 1976 Montana New Zealand Book Award for Poetry

Works

• "City Sunday"; "Holidays"; "Kapiti Coast", New Zealand Electronic Poetry Center
• Stanza and Scene (1945)
• Roughshod Among the Lilies, (1951)
• The Sun Among the Ruins (1951)
• New Worlds for Old (1957).
• Bread and a Pension. Pegasus Press. 1964.
• Land like a lizard, New Guinea poems. Jacaranda Press. 1970. ISBN 978-0-7016-0346-5.
• Onion (1972)
• Coming and Going. Mallinson Rendel. 1982. ISBN 978-0-908606-14-6.
• Winter Apples (1984)
• True confessions of the last cannibal: new poems. Antipodes Press. 1986. ISBN 978-0-9597805-0-5.
• Terry Sturm, ed. (2000). Selected poems. Victoria University Press. ISBN 978-0-86473-350-4.

Criticism

• "Starveling Year, poems by Mary Stanley", new zealand electronic poetry centre