Search Party: Collected Poems
by William Matthews
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Description
When William Matthews died of a heart attack in 1997, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor and wit were balanced by deep emotion, whose off-the-cuff inventiveness belied the acuity of his verse. With Search Party, his son Sebastian and his friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly have brought together a collection drawing from all of Matthews's previously published work as well as twenty-three never-before-published poems. Here show more are meditations on relationships, work, family life, and, of course, jazz: "I love the smoky libidinal murmur / of a jazz crowd ... / I like to slouch back / with that I'll-be-here-awhile tilt." Pleasure is abundant in these poems: music, wine, love, and language are, for Matthews, the necessary consolations for life's suffering. Full of as much wisdom and song as heartbreak and loss, Search Party will bring a wider reading audience to this "poet of experience" and his benedictions of everyday life. show lessTags
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Member Reviews
This is a wonderful book, valuable for the sensitivity of the selections, though disappointing because it is a "selected" and not the complete poems implied in the title's use of the term "collected." A selection partly made by the poet's son, along with the poet Frank Bidart. William Matthews was one of the great American poets of his generation. This is a very handsome book with a broad selection of the poet's wotk.
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Author Information
18+ Works 412 Members
William Matthews (1942-1997) received the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association in 1997. Educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina, he taught and lectured all across the United States
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- Members
- 70
- Popularity
- 441,989
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.16)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 3
- UPCs
- 2
- ASINs
- 2
