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Northern Summer

New and Selected Poems 1963-1983

John Matthias

No Text
Imprint: Anvil Press Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Hardback (224 pages)
(Pub. May 1997)
9780856461149
Out of Stock
Paperback (224 pages)
(Pub. May 1984)
9780856461156
Out of Stock
  • Description
  • Author
  • Northern Summer is a representative selection from John Matthias’s previous books, together with a group of poems written since 1980. Robert Duncan wrote of his first book, Bucyrus, that in part ‘Matthias is a Goliard – one of those wandering souls out of a dark age in our own time.’ The present selection includes the three epistolary poems from Turns – hailed as ‘major art’ by Arthur Oberg in Western Humanities Review – as well as the long ‘Poem for Cynouai’ from Crossing, which extends and modifies their idiom. The book reprints entire ‘The Stefan Batory Poems’, written on a Polish liner while Matthias travelled to America after a year in England during the last stages of the Watergate controversy, along with three sections of ‘The Mihail Lermontov Poems’, written two years later while returning on a Russian ship to England. The comic vision of these poems has been widely acknowledged since the publication of Crossing, a book the Times Literary Supplement found ‘bursting with masterful intelligence’ and Thames Poetry called ‘packed with poetic thought, devilment, and complexities of spirit.’

    The new work in Northern Summer culminates in the title poem, a personal and historical meditation set in Scotland. In it a new landscape and history – that of Fife and ‘The Matter of Scotland’ – join the East Anglian and mid-western American concerns of his earlier work. It is a poem that bears out Neil Corcoran’s observation in PN Review that Matthias is a poet ‘whose exceptionally original work has something of David Jones’s magpie eclecticism and much of his sustaining interest in specific re-imagined historical occasions.’

    John Matthias was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1941. He has lived in California, Indiana, Suffolk, Cambridge and Scotland. He is Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, and has been Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge. His collections of poetry include Bucyrus, Turns, Crossing ... read more
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