Search Party: Collected Poems [Hardcover]

William Matthews (Author), Stanley Plumly (Editor), Sebastian Matthews (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 2004

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers 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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

William Matthews died unexpectedly in 1997 a day after his fifty-fifth birthday, and as poet Stanley Plumly writes in his perceptive and elegant introduction to Matthews' collected poems, "It is still difficult, for many of his friends and admirers, to believe that he is gone." With memories still sharp and the loss so fresh, Plumly and Matthews' son Sebastian present a magnificent selection of Matthews' virtuoso poems. Culled with great sensitivity from his 10 books of poetry, beginning in 1970 and including the posthumously published After All (1998) and an invaluable set of previously uncollected works, this is a stunning volume. Naturally, Matthews' poetry evolved over the decades, gradually shedding the imagistic exuberance of his early works for an increasingly classical mode, an approach that creates a profound tension between the intensity of feeling and the rigor of form. It makes sense that one of Matthews' favorite jazz musicians was saxophonist Lester Young, because, like Young, he is spare in his phrasing, letting silence speak as resonantly as words, and letting the breath guide his rhythm and lines. A master of the understatement, Matthews is wryly philosophical and self-deprecating, but he also evinces surprise and gratitude for the arrival of perfect metaphors. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (January 20, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618350071
• ISBN-13: 978-0618350070
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,663,984 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb craftsman with a wry intelligence and a penguin wit., February 7, 2008

By 

Jeff A. Berger (Bow, WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Search Party: Collected Poems (Hardcover)

William Matthew's collected poems are a joy as well as a challenge to read. He does not take the easy route to any conclusion, and the twists and turns can take you into poetic spaces it's not so easy to get out of. His language is superb regardless of the subject, which is far-ranging with much allusion to music and culture. He is an inspiration for other poets because of the amazing marriage of brilliant intellect and the hand-held phrase.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "what it feels like to be human", November 2, 2010

By 

John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Portsmouth NH) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Search Party: Collected Poems (Paperback)

I know I give 5 stars too often. It's usually because the writer has achieved what he set out to do--which is a five-star feat. But in this case, the 5 stars represent a truly exceptional book, on that makes me glad that I've lived this long to read it, and sad that I didn't find it ten or twenty years ago. Ten years ago would have been reasonable. I met his first wife, then Poet Laureate of New Hampshire. And five years ago I read Sebastian's, his son, memoir in pursuit of what I call "daddy literature." I've even had many fellow poets refer in passing to "Bill said this" and "Bill said that." Enough. This last month I've been immersed in this superb collection. The editors (including Sebastian and Stanley Plumly, the dedicatee of one of the poems) took great care in making the book chronologically 'readable.' As a voracious reader of 'collected' and 'complete' editions, I deeply appreciated this. But all the mastery of formal craft in the world doesn't make a masterful work unless the materials at hand are worthy and these are truly worthy. I've rarely been so comfortable with a poet, so comfortable with his honesty, his sincerity. (His three ex-wives may differ.) Here's a poet who is gifted, smart, and flawed, and upfront and frank about all three. It's best summarized in what might pass for his ars poetica, although I think he's too self-effacing to ever deliberately create anything as exalted as an ars poetica. Anyway, in "A Poetry Reading at West Point" (pp. 297-298), he answers a cadet's question in three different places, "I try to write as well as I can / what it feels like to be human", "I try to say what I don't know / how to say but of course, I can't / get much of it down at all", and "I don't want my poems to be hard, / unless the truth is, if there is / a truth". And you know what? I believe he believed that. Tack those three sentences to your wall and make a life of them in your writing; with the evidence at hand, William Matthews did. And thank God for that, if there is a God.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Moving_Again, March 2, 2009

By 

Rex H. Osteen - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Search Party: Collected Poems (Hardcover)

The book was everything it was described to be, (and more, to me), because of the poems.