Selected Poems and Translations

The road is what the car drinks/traveling on its tongue of light/all the way home. With lines like these William Matthews has created a body of work that stands alone in American poetry. Witty sophisticated yet lucid his poems bring the reader refreshing insights into the everyday world of sports music wine psychology homes pets love children and literature. In the course of a brilliant career Matthews has also translated poems from French Latin and Bulgarian. In this first selection culled from his complete body of work readers who have never sampled Matthews''s poetry or who cannot find it in print will be able to take the measure of one of our most versatile and original poets. Matthews characteristically watches the lights come on/in the valley like bright type/being set in another language. Illuminating and thoughtful his poems speak the truth in a way that prompted Peter Stitt one of our most respected critics to write that William Matthews may be the wisest poet of his generation. In writing about W.H. Auden Matthews could be describing himself: The language has used him/ well and passed him through./We get what he has collected. This book which includes some previously uncollected poems and translations also draws on nine previous volumes: Ruining the New Road Sleek for the Long Flight Sticks & Stones Rising and Falling Selected Translations from Jean Follain Flood A Happy Childhood (that astonishing collection of poems with titles from Freud) Foreseeable Futures and Blues If You Want as well as translations from Martial and contemporary Bulgarian poets. Our true subject is loneliness he writes. We''ve been divorced 1.5 times/per heart. But think/with your body: not to be dead is to be/sexual vivid tender and harsh a riot/of mixed feelings and able to choose.