Search Party: Collected Poems of... | Buy

Summary

When William Matthews died of a heart attack in 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor and wit were balanced by deep emotion, whose off-the-cuff inventiveness belied the acuity of his verse. With Search Party, his son Sebastian and his friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly have brought together a collection drawing from all of Matthews"s previously published work as well as twenty-three never-before-published poems. Here are meditations on relationships, work, family life, and, of course, jazz: "I love the smoky libidinal murmur / of a jazz crowd . . . / I like to slouch back / with that I'll-be-here-awhile tilt." Pleasure is abundant in these poems: music, wine, love, and language are, for Matthews, the necessary consolations for life's suffering. Full of as much wisdom and song as heartbreak and loss, Search Party will bring a wider reading audience to this "poet of experience" and his benedictions of everyday life.

Author Biography

William Matthews (1942-1997) received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association in 1997. Educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina, he taught and lectured all across the United States

Introduction	p. xvii
Ruining the New Road
The Search Party	p. 3
Psychoanalysis	p. 5
Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41	p. 6
Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP	p. 7
Jealousy	p. 8
Moving	p. 10
Lust	p. 11
Faith of Our Fathers	p. 12
Why We Are Truly a Nation	p. 13
On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen	p. 14
Driving All Night	p. 15
Oh Yes	p. 16
Old Girlfriends	p. 17
What You Need	p. 18
Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1959	p. 19
Yes!	p. 20
Sleek for the Long Flight
Directions	p. 23
Sleeping Alone	p. 24
Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night	p. 25
Another Beer	p. 26
Night Driving	p. 28
The Needle's Eye, the Lens	p. 29
An Egg in the Corner of One Eye	p. 30
The Cat	p. 31
Talk	p. 34
La Tache 1962	p. 35
Snow	p. 36
Sleep	p. 38
Letter to Russell Banks	p. 40
Sticks & Stones
The Portrait	p. 45
Mud Chokes No Eels	p. 46
Beer after Tennis, 22 August 1972	p. 47
Bring the War Home	p. 48
The Waste Carpet	p. 49
Sticks & Stones	p. 54
Rising and Falling
Spring Snow	p. 59
Moving Again	p. 60
Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo	p. 62
The News	p. 63
Strange Knees	p. 64
Living Among the Dead	p. 65
Left Hand Canyon	p. 67
In Memory of the Utah Stars	p. 69
Bud Powell, Paris, 1959	p. 71
Listening to Lester Young	p. 72
The Icehouse, Pointe au Baril, Ontario	p. 73
The Mail	p. 75
Taking the Train Home	p. 76
Waking at Dusk from a Nap	p. 79
In Memory of W. H. Auden	p. 81
Nurse Sharks	p. 83
Long	p. 85
Flood
New	p. 89
Cows Grazing at Sunrise	p. 90
Housework	p. 91
Bystanders	p. 92
Twins	p. 94
Our Strange and Lovable Weather	p. 96
Descriptive Passages	p. 98
Good Company	p. 100
School Figures	p. 102
Pissing off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal	p. 104
The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives	p. 106
Bmp Bmp	p. 107
Nabokov's Death	p. 109
On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, NH	p. 111
Uncollected Poems (1967-1981)
The Cloud	p. 115
Eternally Undismayed Are the Poolshooters	p. 120
The Drunken Baker	p. 122
Leaving the Cleveland Airport	p. 123
Dancing to Reggae Music	p. 124
Gossip	p. 126
Iowa City to Boulder	p. 127
Lions in the Cincinnati Zoo	p. 128
A Walk with John Logan, 1973	p. 129
Clearwater Beach, Florida, 1950	p. 130
Jilted	p. 132
A Happy Childhood
Good	p. 135
Sympathetic	p. 139
Whiplash	p. 140
Bad	p. 143
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life	p. 147
Loyal	p. 149
A Happy Childhood	p. 150
Civilization and Its Discontents	p. 156
Familial	p. 158
Right	p. 159
The Theme of the Three Caskets	p. 163
Masterful	p. 166
An Elegy for Bob Marley	p. 167
Wrong	p. 169
Foreseeable Futures
Fellow Oddballs	p. 175
April in the Berkshires	p. 176
Photo of the Author with a Favorite Pig	p. 177
The Accompanist	p. 178
Herd of Buffalo Crossing the Missouri on Ice	p. 180
Caddies' Day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio	p. 181
Dog Life	p. 183
Recovery Room	p. 184
Black Box	p. 186
Vasectomy	p. 187
Blues If You Want
Nabokov's Blues	p. 191
39,000 Feet	p. 194
Mood Indigo	p. 196
Housecooling	p. 198
Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog	p. 199
The Blues	p. 201
Moonlight in Vermont	p. 203
Smoke Gets in Your Eyes	p. 205
School Days	p. 207
Little Blue Nude	p. 208
Onions	p. 212
Straight Life	p. 214
Time & Money
Grief	p. 221
The Wolf of Gubbio	p. 222
Mingus at The Showplace	p. 223
The Bear at the Dump	p. 224
My Father's Body	p. 226
Time	p. 228
President Reagan's Visit to New York, October 1984	p. 232
Mingus at The Half Note	p. 233
Men at My Father's Funeral	p. 235
The Rookery at Hawthornden	p. 236
Note Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I Borrowed, and He Would Next, at a Summer Writers' Conference	p. 238
Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959	p. 240
The Rented House in Maine	p. 241
Mingus in Diaspora	p. 243
Tomorrow	p. 245
Money	p. 247
The Generations	p. 251
Cancer Talk	p. 253
A Night at the Opera	p. 254
Uncollected Poems (1982-1997)
Another Real Estate Deal on Oahu	p. 259
Slow Work	p. 261
E lucevan le stelle	p. 262
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clarinetist	p. 263
Debt	p. 264
Condoms Then	p. 265
Condoms Now	p. 266
Phone Log	p. 267
Driving Through the Poconos, Route 80, 1:30 A.M., Snow	p. 268
The Buddy Bolden Cylinder	p. 269
The Memo	p. 270
Grandmother Talking	p. 271
Grandmother, Dead at 99 Years and 10 Months	p. 272
Names	p. 274
I Let a Song Go out of My Heart	p. 276
After All
Mingus in Shadow	p. 279
Rescue	p. 280
Truffle Pigs	p. 282
Manners	p. 283
Promiscuous	p. 285
Sooey Generous	p. 287
Oxymorons	p. 290
Dire Cure	p. 291
Umbrian Nightfall	p. 295
The Cloister	p. 296
A Poetry Reading at West Point	p. 297
People Like Us	p. 299
Frazzle	p. 300
The Bar at the Andover Inn	p. 301
Big Tongue	p. 302
Bucket's Got a Hole in It	p. 305
Misgivings	p. 306
Care	p. 307
Index of Titles	p. 309
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

INTRODUCTIONThe poems in this collection represent the best of William Matthewss ten original books of poetry, almost thirty years worth, beginning in 1970 and including the posthumous After All, 1998. There are some hundred and sixty- five poems here, twenty-six of which are from work previously unpublished in a book. In the course of his remarkable career, Matthews placed in various magazines- from the ephemeral to The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker-more than eight hundred poems. He was prolific, but he was also selective. When it came time to assemble a new volume, he was severe. Either a poem played in concert with the concept of the whole manuscript or it didnt. Fewer than half the poems he wrote made it into books. With the help of Michael Collier, Houghton Mifflins poetry consultant, and Peter Davison, Matthewss longtime friend and editor, Sebastian Matthews and I have followed the authors model in producing a collection we feel he would be proud of, a selection he himself might have made. Matthews died on November 12, 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday. He had, just days before, sent off the completed manuscript of After All, in accordance with a creative schedule that presented a new book of poetry every three years. Added to this calendar were any number of critical essays, commentaries, memoir pieces, reviews, and interviews, many of which have been gathered into Curiosities (1989) and The Poetry Blues (2001). Matthewss marvelous letters make up yet another category. His correspondence with the world, through his masterly poems and graceful prose, was rich and varied; his correspondence with his friends and acquaintances was loving, engaging, and always on point. All of Matthewss writing, regardless of genre, reveals the man, both the persona he wished to disclose and the person he almost successfully kept to himself. His brilliance and volubility are inseparable from his reserve-the tension between them is the core dynamic of his kinetic mind and demanding language. His announced self and secret self parley not only the precision of his diction and imagination but the spoken music of his sentence. His poetry, like his prose, can seem impromptu, when in fact it is written in astute, rehearsed internal conversation within a form itself being addressed. Matthewss buoyant feel for analysis, his restless curiosity, his refreshing range of knowledge, his quirky, often sardonic take on memory, his insistence on the invisibility of his craft- these elements and more set him apart as a maker. To paraphrase, however, is only to suggest Matthewss depth and resonance as a poet. The implicit chronology of this careful selection of his poems conjures a narrative of work that moves from the imagistic, aphoristic seventies to the more directly autobiographical eighties to the more meditative, introspective nineties. All the while the poems grow in size, texture, complexity, darkness, and acceptance of the given

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