In March 2025, Mica Press published SAFE GROUND (Rosie’s fifth book of poetry). Jennifer Johnson in London Grip: ‘I highly recommend Safe Ground as it intelligently and powerfully communicates both the pain and joy of a complex life, lived by a cultured woman who has resolved ‘Like Father, like daughter, I would live my life to the full and embrace love.’ 

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In The High Window, Colin Pink: ‘Johnston is a masterly story-teller. … An apt sub-title for this book might be families and how to survive them’. He says ‘Laughing and Grief: Paris 2020’ is ‘a very tender and understated story and all the more powerful for it. The past and present are interweaved in a subtle dance of reconciliation and healing … There is tenderness, trauma and wisdom in these pages’ 

In his Elliptical Movements blog, Irish reviewer, publisher and poet Billy Mills has praised Rosie’s ‘two fine collections navigating trauma’ (including Six-Count Jive, Lapwing, 2019, reviewed here in 2020) and how, ‘in the final poem in the book, there is a sense of wholeness, the Waste Land redeemed, its curse lifted by (and by) the sea’. 

In Ultramarine Review, Setareh Ebrahimi: ‘The sea is what offers peace and an alternative path to the difficulties presented. In Oyster Seventeens Rosie writes, “The sea nestles me; my/best mother”. Joy is found at the beach repeatedly. Little details are focussed on, in opposition to larger problems. In the poem Happy the Woman Rosie writes, “Happy the woman whose sweetest days/stroll with the tide’s roll, calmly sway.”‘