Selected Poems and Translations
by Matthews, William
- Used
- Hardcover
- Signed
- Condition
- Like New/Like New
- Seller
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Edison, New Jersey, United States
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About This Item
New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1992 A beautiful version fo this book. Signed on the title page. Includes reviews and clippings about the poet and the book.
Synopsis
"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."
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Details
- Bookseller
- The Herbert Morris Collection
(US)
- Bookseller's Inventory #
- 000125
- Title
- Selected Poems and Translations
- Author
- Matthews, William
- Format/Binding
- Cloth
- Book Condition
- New
- Jacket Condition
- Like New
- Quantity Available
- 1
- Binding
- Hardcover
- Publisher
- Houghton-Mifflin
- Place of Publication
- New York
- Date Published
- 1992
Terms of Sale
The Herbert Morris Collection
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About the Seller
The Herbert Morris Collection
Biblio member since 2014
Edison, New Jersey
About The Herbert Morris Collection
Specializing in The Great Writers
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- Title Page
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