After All: Last Poems
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About this ebook
In this collection of poems completed shortly before his death, William Matthews seems to be looking his last on all things lovely: music, food and wine, love. In the stunning central poem, “Dire Cure,” which forms a kind of spine to the book, he describes the remarkable implications of the “heroic measures” that saved the life and restored the health of his wife from “a children’s cancer (doesn’t that possessive break your heart?).” He evokes the death of his favorite jazz musician, Charles Mingus. He speaks of cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, of the past, of history, of joys proposed, but especially, with his characteristic relaxed wit, of language and its quiddities: “My love says I think too damn much and maybe she’s right.”
After All is the final word from this winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the most pensive and delicious of all our poets.
“Range[s] widely and brightly from Prague in 1419 to a Caribbean island in 1967 to Martha Mitchell, Finn sheep, and a poetry reading at West Point. A lovely finale.” —Library Journal
“His poems have an authentic lyricism, taut and inevitable in its music and movement.” —Charles Simic, author of The Lunatic: Poems
William Matthews
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9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Posthumously published volume, and of very high quality. A rare quality in American poets, William Matthews seems to have gotten better with age. I want to call him wise, in both senses of the word-- a wise guy and full of wisdom.
Book preview
After All - William Matthews
First Mariner Books edition 2000
Copyright © 1998 by the Estate of William Matthews
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.
www.hmhco.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Matthews, William, 1942–1997.
After all : last poems / William Matthews.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-91340-3
ISBN 0-618-05685-8 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3563.A855A69 1998
811'.54—dc21 98-22909 CIP
eISBN 978-0-544-10168-5
v3.0818
Some of the poems in this book have appeared in the following publications: ACM (Another Chicago Magazine): Frazzle. The Atlantic Monthly: Dire Cure; No Return; The Shooting. Black Warrior Review: Big Tongue. Brilliant Corners: Mingus in Shadow. Crab Orchard Review: Finn Sheep; Oxymorons; Rescue. Double Take: Morningside Heights, July; A Poetry Reading at West Point; Promiscuous. Five Points: Inspiration; Manners; Hotel St. Pierre, Paris, 1995. The Gettysburg Review: Euphemisms; Mingus in Shadow. Hubbub: People Like Us. Many Mountains Moving: Ice Follies. The Marlboro Review: Trees in Harold Baumbach’s Paintings. The Nation: Rocas del Caribe, Isla Mujeres, 1967; Hotel Raphael, Rome, 1987. New England Review: Prescience. The New Yorker: Bucket’s Got a Hole in It; The Cloister; Truffle Pigs; Vermin. The Ohio Review: The Bar at the Andover Inn; Memory; Dog Days; Willow, Weep for Me. Poetry: The Place on the Corner; A Serene Heart at the Movies; Job Interview; Misgivings. Quarterly West: Sooey Generous. Shenandoah: Le Quatre Saisons, Montreal, 1979. Slate: Care. Solo: Defenestrations in Prague. Third Coast: Thinking About Thinking.
for Celia
Mingus in Shadow
What you see in his face in the last
photograph, when ALS had whittled
his body to fit a wheelchair, is how much
stark work it took to fend death off, and fail.
The famous rage got eaten cell by cell.
His eyes are drawn to slits against the glare
of the blanched landscape. The day he died,
the story goes, a swash of dead whales
washed up on the Baja beach. Great nature grieved
for him, the story means, but it was great
nature that skewed his cells and siphoned
his force and melted his fat like tallow
and beached him in a wheelchair under
a sombrero. It was human nature,
tiny nature, to take the photograph,
to fuss with the aperture and speed, to let
in the right blare of light just long enough
to etch pale Mingus to the negative.
In the small, memorial world of that
negative, he’s all the light there is.