Other Books

In My Father's Footsteps

William Matthews

William Matthews, the author of a dozen books of poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Time and Money in 1995, and, in 1997, the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association. Along with contemporary French and Bulgarian poetry, he translated the epigrams of Martial (The Mortal City, Ohio Review Books) and Aeschylus's Prometheus Unbound (Penn Greek Drama Series). He was born in Cincinnati and educated at Yale and the University of North Carolina. At the time of his death in 1997, he was Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at the College of the City University of New York.

Search Party

Collected Poems
William Matthews
Edited by Sebastian Matthews & Stanley Plumly
Houghton Mifflin 2004
0-618-35007-1 (Cloth)

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.

Reviews

Publisher's Weekly

With 11 books of verse in less than 30 years, Matthews (1942-1997) established a secure reputation as a witty and trustworthy commentator on a particular bandwidth of his generation. His poems--most of all the touching semi-sonnet sequences of A Happy Childhood (1984)--spanned his own experience, from an Ohio small town to Manhattan literary life, with attentive excursions from Maine to Hawaii. Matthews had a way with quotable sayings: "Is love the reward, or the test itself?" His unpretentious free verse and his all-American topics recall slightly older poets such as Philip Levine, Donald Hall and Matthews's friend Gerald Stern. His work stands out, however, for his commitment to jazz, whose giants (most of all Charles Mingus) Matthews commemorates and imitates in off-kilter lines, most of all in 1989's Blues if You Want : "Music's only secret is silence," he wrote there, "It's time/ to play, time to tell whatever you know." His sudden death left a cluster of shocked admirers (including many literary gatekeepers), a posthumous manuscript (After All, 1998) and many uncollected poems. Maryland poet Plumly (Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me) and Matthews's son Sebastian (whose memoir Norton will also release in January) have teamed up to produce what is, despite its title, not a complete poems but an attractive selection, what Plumly deems "the best of" this wry and likable poet's work. (Jan.)

Daily Texan
Poet Matthews' work lives on in 'Search Party'
By Tyler Carson

The distinctly American poet William Matthews died in 1997, but his work lives on with help from son Sebastian Matthews and fellow poet Stanley Plumber. The new book, Search Party, is a conglomeration of the very best of his work, drawing fairly equally from his 11 books.

One of the hallmarks of Matthew's published volumes was that each had a definite theme and narrative. Search Party reflects this tendency - its story is of the life and growth of a poet.

The book immediately draws the reader into a dialogue with a ghost; as Matthews explains it, "I'm in these poems/ because I'm in my life." He addresses the reader several times and, when the tale within the poem reaches a happy end, Matthews closes with, "Admit you're glad."

Several of the poems included were private correspondences with his friends. He thanks Michael Cuddiby for a bottle of fine wine in "La Tache 1962" and congratulates Russell Banks on the birth of his daughter in "Letter to Russell Banks." The tone of the work is musing, intimate and at times almost confessional.

Matthews excitedly shows off the things he loves to the reader - his family, quiet walks in country, Nabokov, Bob Marley and the jazz of Charles Mingus. More than anything, it is clear that Matthews loved life and the written word.

In "A Poetry Reading at West Point," a young cadet asks him why his poems are difficult to understand, and he responds, "I try to write as well as I can/ what it feels like to be human."

As in life, there is also a great deal of sorrow and wry cynicism in Matthews' poetry. He elegizes and celebrates artists who are being eaten away by drugs and hard-living, and meditates on the simple brutalities of existence.

"There's something wrong that can't be salved / something irreversible besides aging" he observes in "Wrong," but his poems never slide into the deep despair that mark so many American poets of the 20th century. There are women and booze and violence in Matthews' poetry, but his pared-down lines treat the subjects with more tenderness than Charles Bukowski or Jack Kerouac.

The last poems in Search Party were sent to publishers just days before Matthews' death, and they have a mellow sweetness in them that leaves his readers with a sense of peace and well-being that defies description. His parting words in "Care" are "Love needs to be set alright/ again and again, and in thanks/ for tending it, will do its very/ best not to consume us." It is a gentle and bittersweet goodbye to his readers, and serves as a last word of advice.

Search Party is an excellent introduction to the life's work of William Matthews, and even those who are already familiar with his poetry should pick the book up. The old poems have been reshuffled in a new way and have become the biography and epitaph of their author.

Provisions: Lost Prose by William Matthews

Sebastian Matthews (Editor)
Sutton Hoo Press 2003

Provisions: Lost Prose by William Matthews is edited by Sebastian Matthews, the author's son, and contains ten original (two-color) images done especially for the book by Cris Cristofaro. 200 copies were set-up and printed by hand from Bembo types on dampened Somerset paper by C. Mikal Oness with help from Allison Quam, Valerie Claeys, and Zachary Carlsen. The full cloth binding was designed and executed by Julie Leonard of Iowa City. 10 copies remain unbound at the press.

We are very excited about Provisions for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its literary importance. Bill Matthews, one of our most important contemporary poets, left behind a large archive containing numerous prose poems and short stories. Matthews included only one prose poem in any of the dozen or so books published during his lifetime, and since the prose material is so compelling, his son Sebastian and I decided to bring out a small collection of these important pieces of his archive. After planning the project and beginning production, Sebastian found even more work that rivaled our original selections in quality, so we added to the book! We finally settled on eight short stories and fourteen prose poems. Provisions is a terrific read, and important for future scholars working on Matthews. I am pleased that readers interested in Matthews' work will be able to find this material in numerous libraries around the country that collect Sutton Hoo Press titles. Scholars will be able to consult our book and prepare theses and grants before traveling to Indiana where the whole archive is now housed. I feel great satisfaction that Sutton Hoo Press has been able to make an important contribution to the Literary Fine Press movement in this age, bringing to light and making accessible texts that trade presses cannot or will not afford to publish.

The Satires of Horace

translated by William Matthews
Ausable Press 2002
ISBN 1-931337-01-2 (Paper)
ISBN 1-931337-00-4 (Cloth)

"Horace's Satires are not, strictly speaking, satires at all, certainly not in the attacking Juvenalian tradition, in which absurdity itself is the ultimate target. Juvenal, of a later generation, is out to draw blood. Horace's intention is to cast light by means roundabout but to the point. His satires are really intimate yet dramatic encounters of dialogue, with the reader as a silent partner. Thus they feel like small talk (chiacchiera) and read like anecdotes, like talking stories with a moral. The original hexameter measures the prose in order to facilitate the flow. Tone is everything in Horace. If Juvenal is tragic, then Horace, the pastoralist, is somewhere between elegiac and comic. For the late William Matthews the sharp-edged, resonant, and rational tone of the Horatian voice is perfect. Matthews, in his own poems, is a master of idiom; in Horace he finds honesty with subtlety, directness with irony, earthiness with sophistication. 'Friends, let's live and eat plainly'-but at the same time well. What is special about Matthews' Horatian Satires is the immediacy of the idiom, the sense of discovery of the actual moment, the quickness of the turn of the line. If we are fools, wisdom and wise words are our only chance. Horace's words, in Matthews' hands, become alive, just-written, and immortal again because they are so new."
-Stanley Plumly

"Recommended for both public and academic libraries."
-Library Journal

The Poetry Blues

Essays and Interviews
William Matthews
Edited by Sebastian Matthews & Stanley Plumly
University of Michigan Press 2001
0-472-09773-3 (Cloth)
0-472-06773-7 (Paper)

A posthumous collection of essays on poetry, jazz, art, and language by one of America's most well respected poets.

In The Poetry Blues, the late William Matthews holds forth on a medley of topics ranging from jazz to nude photography, Byron to Elizabeth Bishop, opera to Emerson. Throughout, Matthews writes about his love of music, language, poetry, and art while illuminating the subtle and important ways in which the things about which he feels passionately help to define and shape him.

The book begins with a candid autobiographical essay, followed by an interview on the influence of jazz music on the poet's early work. Further into the collection, Matthews delves into the nature of the epigram and the work of jazz great Charles Mingus. Along the way, this revered poet offers insight into the work of this contemporaries, including W. S. Merwin, Galway Kinnell, Hayden Carruth, and Richard Hugo.

the book is as much autobiography and cultural criticism as it is literary nonfiction. It will be of interest to writers and teachers of writing, as well as to lovers of literature, language and music. Sebastian Matthews teaches writing at Warren Wilson College. Stanley Plumly is Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland.