Crossing

by John Matthias

The title of the American poet John Matthias's second English volume suggests both continuity and change. The first two sections continue the idiom of `Turns' (1975) and include many poems on English themes. The two concluding sequences chart voyages across the Atlantic; they are as `extravagant, eclectic, polyglot, and original' as his earlier experimental poetry, but more accessible in their narrative and humour. D. M. Thomas wrote of John Matthias's last book in the T.L.S., " `Turns' encompasses the order of art and the painful or grace-giving accidents of life; seriousness and wit; America's present, Russia's Stalinist yesterday, England's distant past; experiment and tradition. Mr. Matthias is eclectic, polyglot, often abstruse... But excessive virtuosity is forgivable in our stark poetic scene, and I admire very much the way life - his own and other people's - presses into his poems. He has something to say and a way of saying it. `Turns' is an exciting, richly promising collection." `Crossing' bears out that promise.

125 pages, Paperback

First published June 30, 1979