Northern Summer

Northern Summer is a representative selection from John Matthias’s previous books, together with a group of poems written since 1980. Robert Duncan wrote of his first book, Bucyrus, that in part “Matthias is a Goliard – one of those wandering souls out of a dark age in our own time.” The present selection includes the three epistolary poems from Turns – hailed as “major art” by Arthur Oberg in Western Humanities Review – as well as the long “Poem for Cynouai” from Crossing, which extends and modifies their idiom. The book reprints entire “The Stepfan Batory Poems”, written on a Polish liner while Matthias traveled to America after a year in England during the last stages of the Watergate controversy, along with three sections of “The Mihail Lermontov Poems,” written two years later while returning on a Russian ship to England. The comic vision of these poems has been widely acknowledged since the publication of Crossing, a book the TLS found “bursting with masterful intelligence” and Thames Poetry called “packed with poetic thought, devilment, and complexities of spirit.”