Kedging: New Poems (Salt Modern Poets) - Softcover

Matthias, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1844713288 ISBN 13: 9781844713288

Publisher: Salt Publishing, 2007

Synopsis

Kedging is John Matthias’s first book of poems since his long New Selected Poems of 2004. The volume is divided into five parts: “Post-Anecdotal” includes short poems on autobiographical and elegiac themes; “The Memoirists” engages the lives and writings of Lorenzo Da Ponte, Edward John Trelawney, Frederick Rolfe, Céleste Albaret, and Vernon Duke; “The Cotranslator’s Dilemmas” deals with Swedish poets, Swedish poems, and issues of translation; “Laundry Lists and Manifestoes” ranges from Homer and the Old Testament to Internet technology; “Kedging in Time” deals with the lives of several families in the context of British naval history; and “The Back of the Book” prints an essay called “Kedging in Kedging in Time,” which was commissioned by Chicago Review as a commentary on the final poem in the volume. The three extended sequences in the book underline the observations of Mark Scroggins in a review of New Selected Poems – that Matthias, working in the tradition of late modernism, but in middle-length poems that are not open-ended, has “written one Briggflatts after another.” Robert Archambeau has said that Matthias writes “successfully in a wider range of styles than any other contemporary poet.” John Kinsella has said simply that Matthias is “a great poet.”

“One of the best poets in the USA.” ―Guy Davenport

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.

Kedging


’s all you’re good for
someone said. Is what? Your good

and for it. Not to fear: O all your
goods so far. Your good 4.

Your goods 5 and 6. With a little tug
at warp. So by a hawser winde

your head about. Thirty nine
among the sands your steps or

riddle there. Who may have
sailed the Alde is old now, olde

and addled, angling still for some
good luck. So labor, lad: when other

moiety of men, tugging hard at kedge
and hawser, drew us from

the sand? Brisk and lively in the
dialect East Anglian. Ain’t so well

as I was yesterday, for I was then
quite kedge. Even though I pull and

pole and persevere I’m blown to
windward. Winding still. Warping so

as not to weep, cadging as I can.

Edition details

• Publisher: Salt Publishing
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1844713288
• ISBN 13: 9781844713288
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188