From Publishers Weekly
John Matthias. Ohio State Univ./Swallow Press, $32.95 (203p) ISBN
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Friedrich Schlegel preferred travelogues, correspondence and autobiographies to novels, "for one who reads them in the romantic sense." Matthias's international plain-style redacts these genres into, and out from, a romance of modernism. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio, quit graduate school in 1966, left the United States, and for many years lived between Notre Dame and Suffolk, where he absorbed the work of British poets upon whom he has since commented acutely. It might be said of him, as he has said of Geoffrey Hill, that the poet reads history "in the hope (and the horror) of finding materials for poems, materials to exploit;" but Matthias's poetic, local, and historical sensibilities are more catholic. After the Beckett-like bad trip of "Bucyrus" (1965), his longer poems crystallize around hermeticism and obscure court records, Scottish genealogy and history, and transatlantic crossings on Polish and Russian vessels (cf. Auden's "Letter to Lord Byron"). The final triptych, formerly A Gathering of Ways (1991), juxtaposes lays of ley lines, Parkman's vision of La Salle's Mississippi, and gnostic heresy at Santiago de Compostela. Formal recurrences stake out hermeneutic horizons: the poet inhabits "An inbetween / when I don't know precisely what I want to do in time / but only where I want to go / again." The shorter poems, occasional, elegiac or ventriloquistic, often recall the cragginess of Matthias's master, David Jones, while continually proclaiming the height of the mark they have set--of "what is wrought by labour": "Who breaks a spear is worth the prize," in the modern bard's "world against all odds." Some of the best are new, and share a fascination with the poet's relation to political power, invoking Hamsun, Mandelstam and the Balkans. Matthias, perhaps more than any living poet in English, makes us want to go again--but also to consider, in hope and horror, that we can.
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
Copyright © 1996, Boston Review. All rights reserved. -- From The Boston Review
