New Selected Poems (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Matthias, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844710408 ISBN 13: 9781844710409

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2004

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 Dónal Gordon

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844710408
• ISBN 13: 9781844710409
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400