Search Party: Collected Poems of William Matthews
Ed. by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly
Houghton Mifflin, $26.00

The poems of William Matthews feel as if they were written by a grown-up, the kind of man who might be recognized from an Updike story, having earned his worldliness by inhabiting our common atmosphere of debts and responsibilities, work and love, the body's satisfactions and its wry, reluctant attritions. Matthews's poetry is usually described as classical. This label is apt for many and obvious reasons, but most importantly because his work does not misspend its inheritance from the Romantics in self-loathing or vatic posturing, two kinds of self-regard deforming contemporary poetry. In particular, the poems from A Happy Childhood (1984) onward offer a pleasing combination of density and proportion as they attempt to be just both to language and to the realms of private and social life. With his very different poetic means, Matthews is not unlike Auden in this (although his elegy for Auden is one of the unfortunate poems in the book). To be sure, the Romantic urge toward transcendence is everywhere in these poems. Yet this desire, like the appreciation of pleasure which rings insistently throughout, never evades the heart's obligations and failures, or an awareness of Horace's dark fires, burning.

For William Matthews, the purpose of a poem is to smooth out the jagged edges that require its existence—to get the poet from the mild self-reproach of first lines like "Last cough / lung cells six hours safe from cigarettes," to the sated giddiness of last lines like "everywhere, all of us / unraveling, it's so good / to be alive." Reading a few Matthews poems is like attending a dinner party thrown by a famously charming epicure. The talk ranges wittily between high and low— Goethe, Mingus, Tuscany, the host's "impudent cock," truffles —and the atmosphere oozes la dolce vita. But if the conversation gets too deep (his wife's cancer, his father's death, his sexual harassment suit, his neglect of his sons), Matthews, with signature suaveness, directs a hang-dog look at the pretty graduate student across the table, drops a gem of winning self-slander, and raises a toast, thereby changing the subject. Poetry should certainly give pleasure—and Matthews's does—but its animating energy should not be pleasure, at least not if it so often claims for itself the depth and scope of pathos.

Buy this book
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Book Sense

 SEARCH