Customer Reviews

Search Party: Collected Poems

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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.

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.

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