Search Party: Collected Poems

by Stanley Plumly (Editor), William Matthews, Sebastian Matthews (Editor)

Overview

When William Matthews died, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor and wit were balanced by deep emotion, whose off-the-cuff inventiveness belied the acuity of his verse. Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work. Edited by his son, Sebastian Matthews, and William Matthews's friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly (who also introduces the book), Search Party is an excellent introduction to the poet and his glistening riffs on twentieth-century topics from basketball to food to jazz.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618565856
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	04/05/2005
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	338
Sales rank:	190,156
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.75(d)

About the Author

William Matthews won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association in 1997. Born in Cincinnati in 1942, he was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. At the time of his death in 1997, he was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.

Read an Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

The poems in this collection represent the best of William Matthews's ten
original books of poetry, almost thirty years' worth, beginning in 1970 and
including the posthumous After All, 1998. There are some hundred and sixty-
five poems here, twenty-six of which are from work previously unpublished in
a book. In the course of his remarkable career, Matthews placed in various
magazines— from the ephemeral to The Atlantic Monthly and The New
Yorker—more than eight hundred poems. He was prolific, but he was also
selective. When it came time to assemble a new volume, he was severe.
Either a poem played in concert with the concept of the whole manuscript or
it didn't. Fewer than half the poems he wrote made it into books.
With the help of Michael Collier, Houghton Mifflin's poetry
consultant, and Peter Davison, Matthews's longtime friend and editor,
Sebastian Matthews and I have followed the author's model in producing a
collection we feel he would be proud of, a selection he himself might have
made. Matthews died on November 12, 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth
birthday. He had, just days before, sent off the completed manuscript of After
All, in accordance with a creative schedule that presented a new book of
poetry every three years. Added to this calendar were any number of critical
essays, commentaries, memoir pieces, reviews, and interviews, many of
which have been gathered into Curiosities (1989) and The Poetry Blues
(2001).
Matthews's marvelous letters make up yet another category. His
correspondence with the world, through his masterly poems and graceful
prose, was rich and varied; his correspondence with his friends and
acquaintances was loving, engaging, and always on point. All of Matthews's
writing, regardless of genre, reveals the man, both the persona he wished to
disclose and the person he almost successfully kept to himself. His brilliance
and volubility are inseparable from his reserve—the tension between them is
the core dynamic of his kinetic mind and demanding language. His
announced self and secret self parley not only the precision of his diction and
imagination but the spoken music of his sentence. His poetry, like his prose,
can seem impromptu, when in fact it is written in astute, rehearsed internal
conversation within a form itself being addressed. Matthews's buoyant feel for
analysis, his restless curiosity, his refreshing range of knowledge, his quirky,
often sardonic take on memory, his insistence on the invisibility of his craft—
these elements and more set him apart as a maker.
To paraphrase, however, is only to suggest Matthews's depth and
resonance as a poet. The implicit chronology of this careful selection of his
poems conjures a narrative of work that moves from the imagistic, aphoristic
seventies to the more directly autobiographical eighties to the more
meditative, introspective nineties. All the while the poems grow in size,
texture, complexity, darkness, and acceptance of the given situation—or, at
the least, a reluctant reconciliation. The full heart behind the poems becomes
more and more available to the luminous mind making them. Too often
honored for his wit alone, the Matthews throughout these pages is a poet of
emotional resolve, enormous linguistic and poetic resources, and, most
especially, a clarifying wisdom. Here he is reinforced as a writer of
responsibility to form and tradition as well as irony and idiom, whether that
heritage refers to literature, jazz, and epicurean delight or elegiac testimonies
for those he has loved.
Reading Matthews you get the impression that his insights and
images and the syntax created by his inevitable ear have traveled great
distances to the page. They have. They arrive distilled from a metaphysics in
which thought is not only feeling but a coherent language, a language that
must be mastered before it can be made. 'Snow Leopards at the Denver
Zoo,' from the seventies, is an early example.

Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo

There are only a hundred or so
snow leopards alive, and three
of them here. Hours I watch them jump
down and jump up, water being
poured. Though if you fill a glass
fast with water, it rings high to the top,
noise of a nail driven true. Snow
leopards land without sound,
as if they were already extinct.

If I could, I'd sift them
from hand to hand, like a fire,
like a debt I can count but can't pay.
I'm glad I can't. If I tried to
take loss for a wife, and I do,
and keep her all the days of my life,
I'd have nothing to leave my children.
I save them whatever I can keep
and I pour it from hand to hand.

The connections in this poem easily surpass discrete metaphor to
become the total medium—submersion—through which they move: from the
snow leopards to water to snow to fire to consuming debt to loss; from
jum to pouring to filling to counting to pouring . . . the concentric circles
derive from and return directly to their common center of gravity in a flow and
speed almost preternatural. Then there is the touch of the 'nail driven true,'
the exquisite understatement of the soundlessness of the leopards,
landing 'as if they were already extinct,' and the reality of taking 'loss for a
wife.' The fragility of the poem is also its subject, the balance of
saving 'whatever I can keep' against the perishability of losing it all. Behind
the poem is the certain knowledge—which is a theme in Matthews's poetry—
that it will all, always, slip through our hands. This genius for turning the most
familiar materials into something extraordinary—both smart and moving at
once—comes from his gift for making connections and exploiting them to the
limit their language will bear.
For all the normal changes in his writing, as Matthews matured he
never surrendered his talent for the fragile, mortal moment that quickens the
feel of things. At times his tone may have sharpened— he loved Byron as
much as he loved Martial—but he never gave in to the fragmentary, the
broken, the piecemeal hard emotion. He was continually a writer of the
controlled but complete embrace. I think the soul of his work is closer to the
toughness and sweetness of Horace, to the passions of mind of Coleridge,
and to the nocturnal blues melancholy of all those jazzmen he revered. He
grew up in Ohio, within the margins of both country and small city, pastoral
and postwar urban. His father worked for the Soil Conservation Service. He
rode a bike, had a newspaper route (the Dayton Daily News), went to the
county fair, played baseball and basketball, moved back to Cincinnati (his
birthplace), then later to a larger, eastern, Ivy League world. A not uncommon
midwestern American story. Yet he never lost his sense of humor about
himself nor forgot where he came from. His complexity combined the Ohioan
and the New Yorker, the boy and the man, beautifully in his poetry.
In the transitional sixties, when he was a graduate student in
Chapel Hill, Matthews met Russell Banks, also in graduate school and also
starting out as a writer. They soon collaborated on what became one of the
exceptional small literary magazines of its era, Lillabulero. The collaboration
would fade but the friendship would last a lifetime. Matthews's commitment
to the small magazine would not fade. It says everything about him that a
good portion of the poems in this collection first appeared in journals of often
very short shelf lives. He became one of the premier poets of his generation,
yet he remained faithful to the idea of where literature can find its first
expression. His democratic instincts never failed him. Matthews was
preeminently fair-minded, and this egalitarian spirit informed every part of his
personality and permitted him to serve vital roles in American poetry culture
at a vital time, from the Poetry Society of America to the National
Endowment for the Arts. And his tireless support of younger writers, it goes
without saying, began with his superb teaching.
It is still difficult, for many of his friends and admirers, to believe
that he is gone. The represented here are alive in ways and at depths
that most poetry can at best aspire to. The intimacy is never too familiar, the
conversation never too friendly, the imagination never too busy, the wit never
too sterling. The fault lines of heartbreak are everywhere, yet they map an
intact emotion. Every gesture, every turn, every reverse is guided and
governed by a classicism that values moderation, generosity, and, at just the
right moment, an utter truth. Timing, indeed, is essential to Matthews's
internal music: he knows just when to smile, when to open the window, when
to change the pace, and when the last line is the last line. And he knows he
knows, without display. Reading this collection, front to back or intermittently
at leisure, we love his mind, we celebrate the skill that lifts the quotidian to
meaning. And we love, even more, the man whose life was so much at stake
in the words.
STANLEY PLUMLY

Copyright © 2004 by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly. Introduction
copyright © 2004 by Stanley Plumly. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xvii
	Ruining the New Road
	The Search Party	3
	Psychoanalysis	5
	Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41	6
	Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP	7
	Jealousy	8
	Moving	10
	Lust	11
	Faith of Our Fathers	12
	Why We Are Truly a Nation	13
	On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen	14
	Driving All Night	15
	Oh Yes	16
	Old Girlfriends	17
	What You Need	18
	Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1959	19
	Yes!	20
	Sleek for the Long Flight
	Directions	23
	Sleeping Alone	24
	Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night	25
	Another Beer	26
	Night Driving	28
	The Needle's Eye, the Lens	29
	An Egg in the Corner of One Eye	30
	The Cat	31
	Talk	34
	La Tache 1962	35
	Snow	36
	Sleep	38
	Letter to Russell Banks	40
	Sticks & Stones
	The Portrait	45
	Mud Chokes No Eels	46
	Beer after Tennis, 22 August 1972	47
	Bring the War Home	48
	The Waste Carpet	49
	Sticks & Stones	54
	Rising and Falling
	Spring Snow	59
	Moving Again	60
	Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo	62
	The News	63
	Strange Knees	64
	Living Among the Dead	65
	Left Hand Canyon	67
	In Memory of the Utah Stars	69
	Bud Powell, Paris, 1959	71
	Listening to Lester Young	72
	The Icehouse, Pointe au Baril, Ontario	73
	The Mail	75
	Taking the Train Home	76
	Waking at Dusk from a Nap	79
	In Memory of W. H. Auden	81
	Nurse Sharks	83
	Long	85
	Flood
	New	89
	Cows Grazing at Sunrise	90
	Housework	91
	Bystanders	92
	Twins	94
	Our Strange and Lovable Weather	96
	Descriptive Passages	98
	Good Company	100
	School Figures	102
	Pissing off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal	104
	The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives	106
	Bmp Bmp	107
	Nabokov's Death	109
	On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, NH	111
	Uncollected Poems (1967-1981)
	The Cloud	115
	Eternally Undismayed Are the Poolshooters	120
	The Drunken Baker	122
	Leaving the Cleveland Airport	123
	Dancing to Reggae Music	124
	Gossip	126
	Iowa City to Boulder	127
	Lions in the Cincinnati Zoo	128
	A Walk with John Logan, 1973	129
	Clearwater Beach, Florida, 1950	130
	Jilted	132
	A Happy Childhood
	Good	135
	Sympathetic	139
	Whiplash	140
	Bad	143
	The Psychopathology of Everyday Life	147
	Loyal	149
	A Happy Childhood	150
	Civilization and Its Discontents	156
	Familial	158
	Right	159
	The Theme of the Three Caskets	163
	Masterful	166
	An Elegy for Bob Marley	167
	Wrong	169
	Foreseeable Futures
	Fellow Oddballs	175
	April in the Berkshires	176
	Photo of the Author with a Favorite Pig	177
	The Accompanist	178
	Herd of Buffalo Crossing the Missouri on Ice	180
	Caddies' Day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio	181
	Dog Life	183
	Recovery Room	184
	Black Box	186
	Vasectomy	187
	Blues If You Want
	Nabokov's Blues	191
	39,000 Feet	194
	Mood Indigo	196
	Housecooling	198
	Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog	199
	The Blues	201
	Moonlight in Vermont	203
	Smoke Gets in Your Eyes	205
	School Days	207
	Little Blue Nude	208
	Onions	212
	Straight Life	214
	Time & Money
	Grief	221
	The Wolf of Gubbio	222
	Mingus at The Showplace	223
	The Bear at the Dump	224
	My Father's Body	226
	Time	228
	President Reagan's Visit to New York, October 1984	232
	Mingus at The Half Note	233
	Men at My Father's Funeral	235
	The Rookery at Hawthornden	236
	Note Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I Borrowed, and He Would Next, at a Summer Writers' Conference	238
	Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959	240
	The Rented House in Maine	241
	Mingus in Diaspora	243
	Tomorrow	245
	Money	247
	The Generations	251
	Cancer Talk	253
	A Night at the Opera	254
	Uncollected Poems (1982-1997)
	Another Real Estate Deal on Oahu	259
	Slow Work	261
	E lucevan le stelle	262
	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clarinetist	263
	Debt	264
	Condoms Then	265
	Condoms Now	266
	Phone Log	267
	Driving Through the Poconos, Route 80, 1:30 A.M., Snow	268
	The Buddy Bolden Cylinder	269
	The Memo	270
	Grandmother Talking	271
	Grandmother, Dead at 99 Years and 10 Months	272
	Names	274
	I Let a Song Go out of My Heart	276
	After All
	Mingus in Shadow	279
	Rescue	280
	Truffle Pigs	282
	Manners	283
	Promiscuous	285
	Sooey Generous	287
	Oxymorons	290
	Dire Cure	291
	Umbrian Nightfall	295
	The Cloister	296
	A Poetry Reading at West Point	297
	People Like Us	299
	Frazzle	300
	The Bar at the Andover Inn	301
	Big Tongue	302
	Bucket's Got a Hole in It	305
	Misgivings	306
	Care	307
	Index of Titles	309

Editorial Reviews

Like his beloved jazzmen, Matthews tried to make his craft sound easy; sometimes he succeeded too well. As the introduction to Search Party explains, a truly collected Matthews would include more than 800 published poems; this volume has just 165, with 26 previously unpublished in book form and 139 from his 10 earlier books of poetry, including the posthumous ''After All.'' Even in this selection by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly, the poems (especially those of the 1980's) become disconcerting in their professional fluency: Matthews, like a busy touring musician, completed each performance, and then moved on. — Stephen Burt

The New York Times

With 11 books of verse in less than 30 years, Matthews (1942-1997) established a secure reputation as a witty and trustworthy commentator on a particular bandwidth of his generation. His poems-most of all the touching semi-sonnet sequences of A Happy Childhood (1984)-spanned his own experience, from an Ohio small town to Manhattan literary life, with attentive excursions from Maine to Hawaii. Matthews had a way with quotable sayings: "Is love the reward, or the test itself?" His unpretentious free verse and his all-American topics recall slightly older poets such as Philip Levine, Donald Hall and Matthews's friend Gerald Stern. His work stands out, however, for his commitment to jazz, whose giants (most of all Charles Mingus) Matthews commemorates and imitates in off-kilter lines, most of all in 1989's Blues if You Want : "Music's only secret is silence," he wrote there, "It's time/ to play, time to tell whatever you know." His sudden death left a cluster of shocked admirers (including many literary gatekeepers), a posthumous manuscript (After All, 1998) and many uncollected poems. Maryland poet Plumly (Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me) and Matthews's son Sebastian (whose memoir Norton will also release in January) have teamed up to produce what is, despite its title, not a complete poems but an attractive selection, what Plumly deems "the best of" this wry and likable poet's work. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

It's a real tragedy to have lost Matthews in 1997 at the relatively young age of 55, but at least we have his poems as consolation. There was always an edge beneath his insouciance, as evidenced by this magisterial collection. (LJ 1/04) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

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