After All
Last Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A collection from "one of the few contemporary poets who really knew how to make the vernacular sing" (Library Journal).
In this collection of poems completed shortly before his death, William Matthews seems to be looking his last on all things lovely: music, food and wine, love. In the stunning central poem, "Dire Cure," which forms a kind of spine to the book, he describes the remarkable implications of the "heroic measures" that saved the life and restored the health of his wife from "a children's cancer (doesn't that possessive break your heart?)." He evokes the death of his favorite jazz musician, Charles Mingus. He speaks of cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, of the past, of history, of joys proposed, but especially, with his characteristic relaxed wit, of language and its quiddities: "My love says I think too damn much and maybe she's right."
After All is the final word from this winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most pensive and delicious of all our poets.
"Range[s] widely and brightly from Prague in 1419 to a Caribbean island in 1967 to Martha Mitchell, Finn sheep, and a poetry reading at West Point. A lovely finale." —Library Journal
"His poems have an authentic lyricism, taut and inevitable in its music and movement." —Charles Simic, author of The Lunatic: Poems
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
What sets Matthews apart from other pleasant, autobiographically inclined poets is that he doesn't emote by rote, but feels sharply and smartly, transforming his sometimes trite scenarios into plain, careful insights. In this last volume, prepared before his death last year at the age of 55, Matthews gathers the stuff of life--car alarms and collegiate days, hospital misery and divorce. His laconic humor is ever at the ready: At a job interview, the poet dodges questions by speaking "fluent Fog." In Scotland, he wonders about the "astonishing sheep with canoe-shaped ears," and is pleased to learn from a shepherd that they are particularly stupid. Elsewhere, he recalls bringing "back a tall bubbin for the nice lady," who turns out to be "Martha Mitchell (wife of John/ Mitchell, soon to be Nixon's attorney general)." He considers such meetings proof that we are "by being born, a hostage/ to history" and deadpans, "Yes, there's cure for youth, but it's fatal." The very best lines combine Matthews's affability with trenchant turns on himself or his beloveds: "I like divorce. I love to compose/ letters of resignation" or "I saw her fierce privacy,/ like a gnarled luxuriant tree all hung/ with disappointments." The all too human singularity of these poems only underlines Matthews irreplacability.
