John Matthias

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." The new work in Northern Summer culminates in the title poem, a personal and historical meditation set in Scotland. In it a new landscape and history - that of Fife and "The Matter of Scotland" - join the East Anglian and Midwestern American concerns of his earlier work. It is a poem that bears out Neil Corcoran's observation in PN Review that Matthias is a poet "whose exceptionally original work has something of David Jones's magpie eclecticism and much of his sustaining interest in specific re-imagined historical occasions."

New and Selected Poems, 1963-1983

Northern Summer

Bathory & Lermontov

Associate Professor in Digital Arts Jane Grant

Jane Grant

David Prior

Director of Research and Professor of Music and Sound Art David Prior

Sound art has long been resistant to its own definition. Emerging from a liminal space between movements of thought and practice in the twentieth century, sound art has often been described in terms of the things that it is understood to have left behind: a space between music, fine art, and performance. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art surveys the practices, politics, and emerging frameworks of thought that now define this previously amorphous area of study. Throughout the Handbook, artists and thinkers explore the uses of sound in contemporary arts practice. Imbued with global perspectives, chapters are organized in six overarching themes of Space, Time, Things, Fabric, Senses and Relationality. Each theme represents a key area of development in the visual arts and music during the second half of the twentieth century from which sound art emerged. By offering a set of thematic frameworks through which to understand these themes, this Handbook situates constellations of disparate thought and practice into recognized centers of activity.

The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art

A Swallow-Press book. Matthias' first collection of poems since Northern summer (1985) consists of three long poems dealing respectively with the East Anglian region of Britain, the American Midwest, and those parts of southern France and northern Spain through which run the pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

John Matthias

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