Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991 - Hardcover

Matthews, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395631211 ISBN 13: 9780395631218

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1992

Synopsis

The author's poems deal with sports, music, wine, homes, pets, love, children, and literature, and are accompanied by poems translated from French, Latin, and Bulgarian

About this title

About the Author

William Matthews won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association in 1997. Born in Cincinnati in 1942, he was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. At the time of his death in 1997, he was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.

From Publishers Weekly

This collection brings together more than 100 poems, chosen from eight previously published volumes, and 40 translations from the French, Latin and Bulgarian. The prodigious output is uneven. Matthews's ( Ruining the New Road ) work is well crafted and rich in imagery, but tends to be overly cerebral. The poet intellectualizes; he explains. Sometimes this tendency manifests itself in a surfeit of cleverness, as in the poem "Funeral Homes": The poem becomes a disquisition on a theme, the language puffed up. Happily, the poet fights his own worst tendencies. Influenced by Freud, he takes as his weapons memory and dreams. When Matthews recalls a specific experience, the poems edge on the anecdotal and nostalgic, as if he knew what he thought before he began the poem, and simply recorded that knowledge, prettily. But he also wants something else--to find "a real lost child"--and his search takes on the second kind of memory, which includes risk and discovery, the psyche's uncovering of what wasn't consciously known. In his best work, Matthews enters new territory, producing a flood of language that traces the ongoing revision of perception.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0395631211
• ISBN 13: 9780395631218
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 200