Varieties of Homage

After a career of some fifty years, John Matthias pays homage in this book to a wide range of poetic masters, early teachers, friends, places, curiosities, fictions, and facts in a hybrid volume including several styles of verse and two essays. Ian Pople in Manchester Review has called Matthias a kind of mid-Atlantic treasure, and Guy Davenport declared him one of the best poets in the USA. Matthias, an editor and teacher, as well as a prolific poet, has written some forty books of poetry, translation, scholarship, and fiction. His most recent volume is a book-length version of his memoir, Living with a Visionary, which was widely read when it appeared in The New Yorker. That account of his late wife Diana’s struggle with Parkinson’s finds a companion here in Hacheston Halt, about the poet’s early visit to Diana’s house in Suffolk.