Pages

A unique voice among contemporary American poets, John Matthias has compiled here a major new collection, his first volume of poetry since the publication in 1995 of his retrospective collections of shorter and longer poems. Divided into three sections, Pages begins with thirty short poems that range in subject from Ovid and Akhmatova to remembered friends and family. The second part is the experimental and expansive title section, engaging a sometimes humorous and sometimes horrifying sequence of contradictions and non sequiturs. The final section of the volume is a poetic pastiche of letters, journals, poems, and scientific literatures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries having to do with botany, botanical drawing, voyages of exploration, and related concerns. Propelled by an unyielding rhythmic energy and the juxtaposition of disparate elements, Matthias again demonstrates the force of his poetic impulse but with a greater formal variety and a wider range of subject than ever before.