John Matthias is a kind of mid-Atlantic national treasure; he was born in Ohio, but married a woman from Hacheston, Suffolk and has spent most of his life shuttling between the two areas. And his status is such that celebratory volumes of essays have been published on him in both the UK and USA. But perhaps that mid-Atlantic status is not an unalloyed blessing. If you are mid-Atlantic, however prized, you are perceived as not being local in the way that Auden suggested was ‘each poet’s aim’. But Matthias is defiantly both local and international; a little of that local is lost from this wonderful book of poems. Matthias has written lovely poems about Suffolk, that mysterious, warm county on the edge of the island of Britain. Unfortunately, many of those poems were written earlier than the poems in this collection, and I hope that they will all be present in the ‘Collected Shorter Poems Vol 1’ when it arrives later this year.
There are some poems about Suffolk, in this volume. These are often responses to concerts at the Snape Maltings, that magnificent concert hall built by Benjamin Britten, amidst the reed beds and saltings of the Alde estuary. This is part of how Matthias responds on to Berg’s ‘Lyric Suite’, performed at Snape: ‘Heavy rain this morning/sent the peahens scurrying, a huddle of ducks/ and guinea fowl disappearing among reeds./ Daffodils were thick along the stream./A tree trunk full of moss. Small brick cottage,/dull red tiles on its roof…I sit/beside the woman I have loved for twenty years/ I think of someone else.’ ‘The Lyric Suite: Aldeburgh Festival, Snape’. And that twist in the tail is one of Matthias’ methods. Matthias establishes himself as a kind of empiricist, with a nod to Keats’ ‘mossed-cottage trees’. Then he will turn the emotional screw often in his own direction.
So Matthias is a romantic who acknowledges the relationship between the inner state and the world that contextualises it. He is also a poet of voracious cultural appetite whose poems take in everything from Percy Grainger’s flagellation to Heine, via Seferis and Frederick Wolfe, Baron Corvo author of the very odd ‘Hadrian VII’. That voraciousness does occasionally create a slightly woozy feel to some of the poems in this book; as if the aesthetic is part of an inability to settle, to see culture as a vast meadow to be grazed almost indiscriminately. Matthias gets away with that voracious grazing because he is an impeccable stylist. And Matthias is the great poet of the sentence, worked with dazzling certainty across his line breaks.
I would suggest that Matthias’ style has two great influences: David Jones, whom he has edited in for Faber, and whose slightly ‘open-form’ writing Matthias actually rejects. What Matthias takes from Jones is an ability to take in cultural reference make it his own and then float it out, like a casting a fly upon a stream to land on the current of the sentence. Matthias’ other great influence is Robert Lowell in the period of For the Union Dead. That reference to Lowell will infuriate Matthias’ many admirers from the post-modern wing of trans-Atlantic poetry. But Matthias is, like Lowell, in many ways, a political poet showing how culture has been politicised and is politicising. And if Matthias is not a ‘confessional’ poet – whatever we mean by that – he is perfectly capable of wearing his heart on his sleeve as we have seen above. So, this is a wonderful book, full of necessary, large and sometimes gestural writing. But it is also full of filigree and empathetic detail of family, friends, landscape and culture.
Ian Pople