Search Party: Collected Poems

by William Matthews

Book 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 Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work.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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 061856585X
• ISBN13: 9780618565856
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 314 Pages
• Weight: 0.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Moving_Again

The book was everything it was described to be, (and more, to me), because of the poems.

You've got to hand it to these young poets

Yup, you have to admire the way they can talk about a Housecooling or a Change of Address and take you off for a minute to dust motes and wiseass teenagers and Mrs. James Joyce unwilling to wash a rat and then come back and leave you smack in the middle of your own pains and the cool iron taste of divorce in the mouth or death on the table. Yup, you've got to hand it to these young poets. Lynn Hoffman, author of the novel bang BANG

This, too, is human

I write out of a visceral reaction to the reviewer who suggested that William Matthews poems are somehow "light weight." While it is tempting to make a wisecrack, or worse, I will refrain in the spirt of Bill Matthews who, upon hearing such a remark would have merely clucked his tongue and smiled, as if to say, "this, too, is human." Those familiar with Bill Matthews relish his poems, which seem light, but, upon closer reading, muse upon the most grave, the most human, of subjects. Rest in peace, Bill. You are not forgotten.

a question for our reader from cincinnati

Dear reader from cincinnati... Say, istn't the "fog on cat's feet" from Carl Sandburg? Anyway, I find Matthews a great poet. And as a musician I enjoy his sensitivity to that art, especially jazz.

neither ode nor rap

one of the things a male poet has to have i think is a manly style. i don't want to read about fog on cat feet or wanderingly like a cloud. i don't want to read lines that begin "O..." so i find matthews quite good. not that he's macho like a rapper, far from it. one of his poems, "The Shooting," is slangy and angry like a rapper, and perhaps shows the limits of rap lines as poetry. matthews anyway isn't angry so much as bemused and saddened. his good education and middle-aged whiteness are usually in evidence, and this gives his poems irony instead of rage and tolerance instead of hate. nor can he resist the urge to write one about his pet cat. but the typical poem here is spare and lucid. as the poet himself says in "A Poetry Reading at West Point": "I don't want my poems to be hard, unless the truth is, if there is a truth." short, accessible, thoughtful and amusing stuff, if maybe a bit lightweight at times.