New Selected Poems

by Matthias, John

• ISBN13: 9781844710409
• ISBN10: 1844710408
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-11-01
• Publisher: Lightning Source Inc

Summary

John Matthias'sNew 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 likeNorthern Summer,Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest,A Compostela Diptych, andCuttings. 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 withWorking 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 I	1	(42)
Swimming at Midnight	3	(1)
Diptych	4	(1)
Arzeno Kirkpatrick	5	(1)
Renaissance	6	(1)
An Absence	7	(2)
Statement	9	(2)
Five Lyrics from ``Poem in Three Parts''	11	(4)
Between	15	(1)
Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest	16	(27)
Part II	43	(54)
Survivors	45	(2)
Edward	47	(2)
U.S.I.S. Lecturer	49	(2)
If Not a Technical Song American:Statement, Harangue, and Narrative	51	(3)
For John, After His Visit: Suffolk, Fall	54	(5)
Once for English Music	59	(3)
Three Around a Revolution	62	(2)
Alexander Kerensky at Stanford	64	(1)
Double Sonnet on the Absence of Text: ``Symphony Matis der Maler,'' Berlin, 1934: -- Metamorphoses	65	(2)
Turns: Toward a Provisional Aesthetic and a Discipline	67	(7)
Double Derivation, Association, and Cliche: from The Great Tournament Rollof Westminster	74	(7)
Clarifications for Robert Jacoby (``Double Derivation . . .'', Part IV, II. 1--10; Part VII, ll. 1--15, 22--28)	81	(5)
Poem for Cynouai	86	(11)
Part III	97	(68)
Double Invocation as a Prologue to a Miscellany of Poems Mostly Written in East Anglia	99	(3)
The Fen Birds' Cry	102	(2)
Evening Song	104	(2)
Two Ladies	106	(4)
Dunwich: Winter Visit Alone	110	(1)
Verrucas	111	(2)
After the Death of Chekhov	113	(2)
You Measure John	115	(1)
My Youngest Daughter: Running Toward an English Village Church	116	(1)
Mark Twain in the Fens	117	(2)
Paul Verlaine in Lincolnshire	119	(2)
Words for Sir Thomas Browne	121	(5)
Lines for the Gentlemen	126	(2)
From a Visit to Dalmatia, 1978	128	(2)
Friendship	130	(2)
Agape	132	(1)
Brandon, Breckland: The Flint Knappers	133	(3)
59 Lines Assembled Quickly Sitting on a Wall Near the Reconstruction of the Lady Juliana's Cell	136	(3)
26 June 1381/1977	139	(5)
On the Death of Benjamin Britten	144	(1)
An East Anglian Diptych	145	(20)
Part IV	165	(56)
Rhododendron	167	(2)
Not having read a single fairy tale	169	(1)
Everything to be endured	170	(2)
Private Poem	172	(1)
Public Poem	173	(1)
E.P. in Crawfordsville	174	(2)
F.M.F. from Olivet	176	(2)
Mr. Rothenstein's Rudiments	178	(5)
Footnote on a Gift	183	(1)
Horace Augustus Mandelstam Stalin	184	(1)
Into Cyrillic	185	(2)
Bogomil in Languedoc	187	(1)
The Singer of Tales	188	(2)
The Silence of Stones	190	(2)
A Wind in Roussillon	192	(8)
Northern Summer	200	(21)
Part V	221	(46)
While You Are Singing	223	(1)
`Void which falls out of void . . .'	224	(1)
On Rereading a Friend's First Book	225	(2)
Two in New York	227	(2)
Easter 1912 and Christmas 1929: Blaise Cendrars and Garcia Lorca in New York (a second take)	229	(2)
Two in Harar	231	(4)
She Maps Iraq	235	(5)
Six Or So In Petersburg	240	(2)
Scherzo Trio: Three at the Villa Seurat	242	(2)
Francophiles, 1958	244	(2)
Some Letters	246	(3)
From Cuttings	249	(18)
Part VI	267	(44)
From A Compostela Diptych	269	(42)
Part VII	311	(66)
Epilogue to a Cycle of Poems on the Pilgrim Routes to Santiago de Compostela	313	(2)
After Years Away	315	(3)
The Key of C Does Not Know My Biography	318	(1)
That Music is the Spur to all Licentiousness	319	(1)
Received by Angels Singing Like the Birds	320	(1)
The Flagellant (i.m. Percy Grainger)	321	(5)
Master Class	326	(2)
Diminished Third	328	(3)
A Note on Barber's Adagio	331	(1)
Sadnesses: Black Seas	332	(2)
Persistent Elegy	334	(2)
My Mother's Webster	336	(2)
The Singing	338	(2)
Left Hands and Wittgensteins	340	(2)
Geneva Pension	342	(2)
Reception	344	(1)
Unfinished	345	(3)
The Lyric Suite: Aldeburgh Festival, Snape	348	(4)
Black Dog	352	(1)
Ohio Forebears	353	(5)
Variations on the Song of Songs	358	(1)
Letter to an Unborn Grandson	359	(7)
Swell	366	(11)
Afterword	377	(4)
Notes	381

Excerpts

A Note on Barber's Adagio . . . Back in Autumn 1963 Samuel Barber was alone and driving through November rain in Iowa or Kansas. When he turned on his radio he heard them playing his Adagio for Strings. Sick to death of his most famous composition, he turned the dial through the static until once again, and clearly- The Adagio for Strings. When a third station, too, and then a fourth, were playing it, he thought he must be going mad. He turned off the radio and stopped the car and got out by a fence staring at the endless open space in front of him where someone on a tractor plowed on slowly in the rain . . . The president had been assassinated earlier that day, but Barber didn't know it yet. He only knew that every station in America was playing his Adagio for Strings. He only knew he didn't know why he should be responsible for such an ecstasy of grief. For Doacute;nal Gordon