John Matthias: New Selected Poems
(Salt Publishing, Cambridge, 2004; paperback, 400pp, £18.98 / US$25.95; isbn 9781844710409)

John Matthias's generous selection from his work of forty years consists of shorter and longer poems, including most of the three long poems published as A Gathering of Ways in 1991. The earlier book placed 'An East Anglian Diptych' first, following it with 'Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest', and concluding with 'A Compostela Diptych'. Matthias places 'Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest' in the first section of his new book and in his Afterword expresses the hope that the poem  'establishes the American Midwest as indeed a home'. New Selected Poems concludes, moreover, with 'Swell', a long poem set at Walloon Lake in Michigan. The arrangement of poems thus reverses the effect of A Gathering of Ways by creating an American framework for Matthias's English and European 'matters'.

No downgrading is involved in this reordering of things. The change is a change of perspective. Matthias's East Anglian poems, and his Scottish poem, 'Northern Summer', sprang from long periods during the seventies and eighties when he made his home in Britain, and his poem about the pilgrimage routes of southern France and northern Spain reflects his passion for the troubadours and the Roman Catholic culture of medieval Europe. The intensity of his feeling and the closeness of his observation in these poems, however, are those of a poet who cannot assume that he belongs to the world he loves, and who therefore does not take what he sees for granted. Paradoxically, it seems that the experience of getting to know parts of England and of Scotland as a relative outsider was what enabled him eventually to see places familiar to him in America anew. Seeing anew, moreover, involved seeing in depth, observing places and perceiving the processes that had made them over time.

In consequence, Matthias's observations of both England and America have been restorative and enlivening. They have both helped him through difficult times, and enabled him to preserve vital connections between the past and the present. The liveliness of his work, it should be said, is partly the result of play. Wordplay characterises Matthias's poetry, but his sense of play is not confined to language. As he writes in 'Double Derivation, Association, and Cliché: from The Great Tournament Roll of Westminster': 'In proper costume, Homo Ludens wears/Imagination on his sleeve'. In 'Clarifications for Robert Jacoby' he recalls, for his cousin, games that were evidently a source of his imagination:

                                            the costumes,
            All the sticks & staves, the whole complicated
                 paraphernalia accumulated to suggest
            Authentic weaponry and precise historical dates,
                 not to mention exact geographical places, …

Another cousin mocks them: 'No mere chronicler, he was reality/itself'. Opposition between poetry as creative play and poetry as the voice of reality is a shaping factor in Matthias's work. He is serious about play, but likes to take his seriousness lightly. Characteristically, he prefers the clown to 'frenzied Margerie Kempe':

            Juliana's
            Kemp's

            the other Kemp's
            Will Kemp's

            who Morris-danced
            from London

            days           on days
            from London

            Kemp's who
            lept!          immortally

            this Norwich wall

The poem from which these lines come, '59 Lines Assembled Quickly Sitting on a Wall Near the Reconstruction of the Lady Juliana's Cell', exhibits a high-spirited poet who can make his lines and words leap when the occasion arises.

Most poets like names, but few relish them as much as John Matthias does. Almost any page from the book provides an example, as here from the beginning of 'A Compostela Diptych':

            Via Tolosona, Via Podiensis.
            There among the tall and narrow cypresses,
            the white sarcophagi of Arles

            worn by centuries of wind & sun,
            where Charlemagne's lieutenants it was said
            lay beside Servilius & Flavius

            and coffins drifted down the Rhone
            on narrow rafts to be unloaded by St. Victor's monks,
            they walked: Via Tolosona.

Place names and personal names compose an historical world. Matthias is a deeply read poet, who gives hostages to fortune by providing lengthy biographical sources for the materials on which his poems are based. He is no pedant or name-dropper, however, but rather a poet with a passion for the particular. He brings a sympathetic intelligence to bear on the lives of individuals, especially artists, writers, and composers – a list which indicates his interest in processes as well as identities, and in the relationship between process and identity. This relationship is central to his preoccupation with place.

All Matthias's concerns come together in his interest in making. 'An East Anglian Diptych' begins:

            … & flint by salt by clay
            by sunrise and by sunset
            and at equinox, by equinox,

            these routes, these
            lines were drawn, are drawn,
            (force by source of sun)

The words name the materials from which the culture of the place is made, and the temporal context of its making, and the force that generates creative life. The poem, dedicated 'in memoriam Robert Duncan and David Jones', shows two of Matthias's principal influences, and pays tribute to them by its originality. Rather than imitating Duncan and Jones, Matthias follows them in releasing his sense of magic powers, at the same time as he expresses his sense of history. The rich evocation of the geological, historical, and cultural processes that have gone to the making of East Anglia incarnate the thisness which, in David Jones's terms, represents 'the actually loved and known'. The poem recalls the 'pinch of earth' which Edward Thomas gave as his reason for joining up to fight in the First World War: 'This!/For this'  The particular incarnates a life and a history. Thisness, in this sense, is literally the ground of vision for Edward Thomas, associated with East Anglia through his book The Icknield Way, and for John Constable, who painted the landscape of his original home.

As I suggested earlier, it was what Matthias perceived in East Anglia that opened his eyes to his American home ground. The following passage occurs in part 5 of 'Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest':

                                 Before the melt,

            Maumee ice flow inching toward a Wabash
            where no water ran, a Saginaw
            into a dry Dowagiac. Before an unbound Kankakee,

            glacial borders pressing ice lobes out
            to flood the valley where no valley was, to spread
            the drift two hundred feet and more above

            Coniferous, Devonian and Trenton rock.
            Before the flood, copper manitous locked up in stone
            on distant islands not enisled

            before the miners who would dig for them
            where no mines were and build the pregnant mounds
            by forest trails that were not blazed.

            Before the forest trails, before the oak & ash,
            path of the moraine: sand and boulders,
            quartzite, clay and till …

            Before the Potawatomies. Before the French.
            Before the Studebaker &
            the Bendix and the Burger Chef. …

As David Jones renders the making of the British cultural landscape in The Anathemata, so Matthias in 'Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest' shows the formation of the geological groundwork, and the making of prehistoric paths, later used by Native American tribes, French explorers, and modern routes. It is a matter of  'before, and before again', as David Jones said; but the result here, as in The Anathemata, is not antiquarianism or nostalgia, but poetry which opens the mind to natural and human creative energies that shape both language and the land.

As New Selected Poems amply demonstrates, Matthias's poetry is much more various than a focus upon his sense of history alone will reveal. He is a poet of family and friendship and of vulnerable personal experience; at times he is closer to John Berryman and Robert Lowell than Duncan and Jones. He is capable of a colloquial speaking voice as well as of the crafted language of his poems concerned with cultural 'gathering' and pilgrimage. As he places the long poem about his American home in the Midwest near the beginning of New Selected Poems, so he concludes the book with a long poem, 'Swell', in which he weaves together reflections on Ernest Hemingway's life and his own:

            It's now 2000 and we can't find Windemere. Thirty years
            between his final summer here and 1950; fifty years
            between my one big catch and this boat on the lake without a line.
            Things have not been swell, have not been great.
            Well, sometimes they were swell: a while ago, & in another country.
            His phrases stuck forever in your mind provided that
            you read him very young.

                                                But this week is okay. We've taken walks,
            eaten whitefish both at Pippin's and the Walloon Inn,
            and tried to figure what it means at sixty still to be alive.
            Who at ten or twenty sees himself in forty, fifty years?
            Robert Lowell barely made it; Berryman,
            who sat cross-legged in my Salt Lake City room
            and recited every word verbatim of A Clean, Well-Lighted Place
            only got to fifty-eight. He said that story was a poem, and
            he was right. I'm older than my teacher was
            when he died. I'm older than Lowell. About the age
            when Hemingway, who, like his father, like crazy Mr. B,
            knew he'd had enough.

                                               I haven't had enough.

The apparent ease of the speaking voice here has forty years of craft behind it. One might reflect also that if Hemingway's themes in the story referred to are mortality and nada, the value he stands by is dignity. The world of Matthias's poems is more richly furnished with the things of civilization than was Hemingway's work. Matthias, like Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, and even more like David Jones, is a poet who remembers, one who works tirelessly to preserve the products of human culture from oblivion. In a poem from his time in England, 'For John, After His Visit: Suffolk, Fall', he wrote: '”I must have savagery,” a wealthy British/poet told me, leaving for the States./I've gone the other way'. The other way meant England, and the position in which Matthias became a generous and knowledgeable anthologist and critic of British poetry. But it meant also the opposite direction from savage egotism, from poetry concerned only with the self. What he found in England and ultimately in America was the making of land and language, and consequently an art rich in creative possibilities. New Selected Poems, the third selection he has made of his work, is the best book in which to appreciate the range of his findings.

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