Northern Summer – John Matthias (Hardback / Hard Cover)

New and Selected Poems, 1963-1983

“Northern Summer”is a representative selection from John Matthias’ previous books, together with a group of poems written since 1980. Robert Duncan wrote of his first book,”Bucyrus”, that in part ‘Matthias is a Goliard – one of those wandering souls out of a dark age in our own time’. The present selection includes the three epistolary poems from”Turns”- hailed as ‘major art’ by Arthur Oberg in”Western Humanities Review”- as well as the long”Poem for Cynouai”from”Crossing”, which extends and modifies their idiom. The book reprints entire”The Stefan Batory Poems”, written on a Polish liner while Matthias travelled to America after a year in England during the last stages of the Watergate controversy, along with three sections of”The Mihail Lermontov Poems”, written two years later while returning on a Russian ship to England. The comic vision of these poems has been widely acknowledged since the publication of”Crossing”, a book the”TLS”found ‘bursting with masterful intelligence’ and”Thames Poetry”called ‘packed with poetic thought, devilment, and complexities of spirit’. The new work in”Northern Summer”culminates in the title poem, a personal and historical meditation set in Scotland. In it a new landscape and history – that of Fife and”The Matter of Scotland”- join the East Anglian and mid-western American concerns of his earlier work. It is a poem that bears out Neil Corcoran’s observation in”PN Review”that Matthias is a poet ‘whose exceptionally original work has something of David Jones’ magpie eclecticism and much of his sustaining interest in specific re-imagined historical occasions’.

Author: John Matthias
Format: Hardback / Hard Cover
Pages: 224
Size: Not Specified
Weight: Not Specified