Time & Money - Hardcover

Matthews, William

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395711347 ISBN 13: 9780395711347

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1995

Synopsis

A new collection by a worldly and cynical writer addresses his lifetime losses and loves, offering his observations on such topics as musicians ("They have to hit the note/and the emotion") and money ("it's math/with consequences").

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Reviews

Things that don't last occupy Matthews in his 10th collection, coming after 1991's Selected Poems and Translations. These 40-plus poems, nearly all previously published, refract irony into an unexpectedly broad spectrum-from the pitch of despair to pale diffidence. Showing a diversity of style, from the incantatory momentum of "My Father's Body," describing the physical processes that follow the death of this "mild, democratic man," to the reflectively grateful notes of "Landscape with Onlooker," Matthews probes what passes-lives, love, certainty and, often, music. Poems about Mingus, Pavarotti, even Bob Marley, weave through the volume's three sections and, like other moments sharply remembered ("In the Boathouse" and "President Reagan's Visit to New York, October 1984") seem to capture the poet's emotional attention at the least remove. Humor, brittle or forgiving, is also generously offered: "that was how I thought/ poetry worked: you digested experience and shat// literature..." he writes about his 17-year-old writing self; yet in a later poem, he gives credit to "...the erotic thrall/ of work as restraint against despair." The best of these poems are powerful, brave and lasting.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A provocative title, Time & Money: two things we have too little of, two elements of modern life we scramble for, complain about, equate, and squander. Matthews means to trigger these slightly bitter thoughts, but he goes far beyond our gut reactions in these fine, quietly furious poems. This is his first book since the impressive Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991 (1992), and his new work is inlaid with an even deeper vein of irony and shaped by an even surer command of language, thought, and emotion. Matthews writes wryly about grief as a communicable ailment and of the emptiness of funerary practices. He ponders the elusiveness of the past, the tricks of time, and the peculiarities of memory. Academic life is miasmal; jazz musician Charles Mingus is an angry, outspoken genius (and, for Matthews, a hero); and money is "not an abstraction; it's math / with consequences." Matthews' poems are igneous in nature: eruptions captured on the page, shards of barely cooled mind lava, the stunning by-products of a surprisingly ordered, highly personal chemistry of heat and pressure, light and dark, living and feeling. Donna Seaman

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0395711347
• ISBN 13: 9780395711347
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128