New Selected Poems: (Salt Modern Poets)

John Matthias's "New Selected Poems" brings together both short and longer poems from eight previous books. It ranges from early lyrics written in America during the 1960s to meditative and epistolary poems deriving from his years spent in England during the 70s and 80s, formal experiments engaging issues of poetics, and sequences like "Northern Summer", "Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest", "A Compostela Diptych", and "Cuttings". Robert Duncan called his early poetry "the work of a Goliard-one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time," and Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him "one of the leading poets in the USA." The present volume, together with "Working Progress, Working Title", published by Salt in 2002, makes almost all of his major work available in Britain for the first time in many years.

Table of Contents:
Part 1 Swimming at Midnight Diptych Arzeno Kirkpatrick Renaissance An Absence Statement Five Lyrics from “Poem in Three Parts” Between Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest Part II Survivors Edward U.S.I.S. Lecturer If Not a Technical Song American:Statement, Harangue, and Narrative For John, After His Visit: Suffolk, Fall Once for English Music Three Around a Revolution Alexander Kerensky at Stanford Double Sonnet on the Absence of Text: “Symphony Matis der Maler,”Berlin, 1934: – Metamorphoses Turns: Toward a Provisional Aesthetic and a Discipline Double Derivation, Association, and Cliché: from The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster Clarifications for Robert Jacoby (“Double Derivation . . . ”, Part IV, ll. 1-10; Part VII, ll. 1-15, 22-28) Poem for Cynouai Part III Double Invocation as a Prologue to a Miscellany of Poems Mostly Written in East Anglia The Fen Birds’ Cry Evening Song Two Ladies Dunwich: Winter Visit Alone Verrucas After the Death of Chekhov You Measure John My Youngest Daughter: Running Toward an English Village Church Mark Twain in the Fens Paul Verlaine in Lincolnshire Words for Sir Thomas Browne Lines for the Gentlemen From a Visit to Dalmatia, 1978 Friendship Agape Brandon, Breckland: The Flint Knappers 59 Lines Assembled Quickly Sitting on a Wall Near the Reconstruction of the Lady Juliana’s Cell 26 June 1381/1977 On the Death of Benjamin Britten An East Anglian Diptych Part IV Rhododendron Not having read a single fairy tale Everything to be endured Private Poem Public Poem E.P. in Crawfordsville F.M.F. from Olivet Mr. Rothenstein’s Rudiments Footnote on a Gift Horace Augustus Mandelstam Stalin Into Cyrillic Bogomil in Languedoc The Singer of Tales The Silence of Stones A Wind in Roussillon Northern Summer Part V While You Are Singing `Void which falls out of void . . . ’ On Rereading a Friend’s First Book Two in New York Easter 1912 and Christmas 1929: Blaise Cendrars and Garcia Lorca in New York(a second take) Two in Harar She Maps Iraq Six Or So In Petersburg Scherzo Trio: Three at the Villa Seurat Francophiles, 1958 Some Letters From Cuttings Part VI From A Compostela Diptych Part VII Epilogue to a Cycle of Poems on the Pilgrim Routes to Santiago de Compostela After Years Away The Key of C Does Not Know My Biography That Music is the Spur to all Licentiousness Received by Angels Singing Like the Birds The Flagellant (i.m. Percy Grainger) Master Class Diminished Third A Note on Barber’s Adagio Sadnesses: Black Seas Persistent Elegy My Mother’s Webster The Singing Left Hands and Wittgensteins Geneva Pension Reception Unfinished The Lyric Suite: Aldeburgh Festival, Snape Black Dog Ohio Forebears Variations on the Song of Songs Letter to an Unborn Grandson Swell

About the Author :
John Matthias was born in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. Matthias’s recent books include A Gathering of Ways (1991), Swimming at Midnight: Selected Shorter Poems (1995), Beltane at Aphelion: Longer Poems (1995), and Pages: New Poems and Cuttings (2000).

Review :
Over thirty years [Matthias] has built up a splendidly wrought mosaic of western culture and history shot through with personal inquiry and discovery. It’s a fascinating, unfinished journey, a secular but passionate pilgrimage. I am not suggesting that Matthias is some latter-day Wallace Stevens (`Thou art not August unless I make thee so’). But what this wonderful selection brings home to its readers is both the power and the provisional nature of our imaginings. Matthias consistently works to show us how the apparently distant is not only close to us, but constitutive of who we are. in Mattthias’ poems we go out into the world of remote facts and unknown names only to find in the end that these remote things have immediate relevance to us, that we have always been who we are because of them, but hadn’t known it.