John Matthias has a new book out: _Pages: New Poems & Cuttings_, Swallow
/ Ohio UP, unpriced but presumably distributed in the UK.
The great strength of his work is the way he plays his language across
documentary bases and the middle section of this book, _Pages_, is a
fine example: a sequence of five mixed poetry/prose texts focussing on
different years of his life, mixing personal memory with a kind of
artificial memory culled from a variety of sources; the power of it is
partly that the memoryfest is played against his mother's loss of memory
to Alzheimer's, marked by the recurrent sentence 'Take me home she said
don't sell the house I can't remember quite which one you are you know I
don't live here I'm only visiting'. Matthias has a great eye & ear for
the morphology of images, setting disparate strands one against another;
I particularly enjoy the text for 1953 where the coronation of Eliz II
is interwoven with Ethel Rosenberg going to the electric chair which in
turn weaves in another Ethel Rosenberg who 'ran the deli down on Hudson
Street beside the movie house', all bound in with early pubescent
memories of a friend's older sister's exhibitionism.
--
AH
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