Northern Summer: New & Selected Poems, 1963-1983

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 \u201cMatthias is a Goliard - one of those wandering souls out of a dark age in our own time.\u201d The present selection includes the three epistolary poems from Turns - hailed as \u201cmajor art\u201d by Arthur Oberg in Western Humanities Review - as well as the long \u201cPoem for Cynouai\u201d from Crossing, which extends and modifies their idiom. The book reprints entire \u201cThe Stepfan Batory Poems\u201d, written on a Polish liner while Matthias traveled to America after a year in England during the last stages of the Watergate controversy, along with three sections of \u201cThe Mihail Lermontov Poems,\u201d 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 TLS found \u201cbursting with masterful intelligence\u201d and Thames Poetry called \u201cpacked with poetic thought, devilment, and complexities of spirit.\u201d

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 \u201cThe Matter of Scotland\u201d - join the East Anglian and Midwestern 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 \u201cwhose exceptionally original work has something of David Jones’s magpie eclecticism and much of his sustaining interest in specific re-imagined historical occasions.\u201d