Search Party: Collected Poems

by William Matthews, Sebastian Matthews (Editor), Stanley Plumly (Editor)

Overview

From the prize-winning poet: “A stunning volume . . . A master of the understatement, Matthews is wryly philosophical and self-deprecating.” —Booklist

When William Matthews died, 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. Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work. Edited by his son, Sebastian Matthews, and William Matthews's friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly (who also introduces the book), Search Party is an excellent introduction to the poet and his glistening riffs on twentieth-century topics from basketball to food to jazz.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780547348605
Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publication date:	11/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	576 KB

About the Author

William Matthews won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association in 1997. Born in Cincinnati in 1942, he was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. At the time of his death in 1997, he was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The Search Party

I wondered if the others felt as heroic and as safe: my unmangled family slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead behind my flashlight's beam.
Reader, by now you must be sure you know just where we are,
You're wrong, though it's an intelligent mistake.
A man four volunteers to the left of me made the discovery.
Psychoanalysis

Everything is luxurious; there is no past,
Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41

Although my house floats on a lawn as plush as a starlet's body and my sons sleep easily,
Hearing him dead,
Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP

As if that sax were made of bone wrenched from his wrist he urged through it dank music of his breath. When he blew ballads you knew one use of force:
Jealousy
2
This way love dies somewhere else,
4
5
Moving

When we spurt off in the invalid Volvo flying its pennant of blue fumes,
Lust

It is a squad car idling through my eyes, bored,
Faith of Our Fathers

Now it is time to see what's left:
Why We Are Truly a Nation

Because we rage inside the old boundaries,
Because we all dream of saving the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,
Because grief unites us,
On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen
Driving All Night

My complicated past is an anthology,
But it's not true.

Days ahead, snow heaps up in the mountains like undelivered mail.
Your heart begins to fall like snow inside a paperweight.
Oh Yes
And your tongue:
We're sewn into each other like money in a miser's coat.
Old Girlfriends

I thrust my impudent cock into them like a hand raised in class.

What they knew that I didn't learn was not to ask:

one participates.

To say one is "in love"
To say "one" is in love means me, hero of all these poems,
What You Need

Suppose you want to leave your life,
It closes cozily as a clerk's hand,
You hate it the same way the drunken son loves Mother.

You will need pain heaving under you like frost ruining the new road.

Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1959

for Dave Curry

After each rain the workers bring the eroded soil back up the slope in baskets.
Yes!

You come home loved and troubled,
CHAPTER 2

Directions

The new road runs into the old road, turn west when your ankles hurt.
Sleeping Alone

A man is a necessity. A girl's mother says so by the way her hands come together after certain conversations, like a diary being closed.

But a boy's mother tells him a woman is a luxury. Maybe when he graduates his mother hugs him and forgets herself, she bites his earlobe! She remembers the hockey skates she gave him for Christmas when he was eight; the stiff flaps in back of the ankles resembled monks' cowls. The year before, the road froze over — they seemed to be what he should want.

Meanwhile the girl grows older, she hasn't been eight for ten years, her father is cruel to her mother. She'll always have a man, the way she likes to have in her room, even when visiting, a sandalwood box for her rings and coins, and a hand-painted mug showing two geese racing their reflections across a lake.

Maybe she will meet the boy, maybe not. The story does not depend on them. In a dark room a couple undress. She has always liked men's backs and holds on with her fingertips, like suction cups, turning one cheek up to him and staring through the dark across the rippled sheet. He breathes in her ear — some women like that. Or maybe they've loved each other for years and the lights are on. It doesn't matter; soon they will be sleeping.

Why do we say we slept with someone? The eyelids fall. It isn't the one you love or anyone else you recognize who says the only words you will remember from the dream. It must be the dream speaking, or the pope of all dreams speaking for the church. It says, It's OK, we're only dying.

Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night

I remember asking where does my shadow go at night?
Another Beer

The first one was for the clock and its one song which is the song's name.

Then a beer for the scars in the table,
Then a beer for the thirst and its one song we keep forgetting.

And a beer for the hands we are keeping to ourselves.
And a beer for our reticence,
Then a beer for the juke box.
And a beer for the phone booth.
And let's have a beer for whoever goes home and sprawls, like the remaining sock,
And a beer for anyone who can't tell the difference between death and a good cry with its one song.
Night Driving

You follow into their dark tips those two skewed tunnels of light.
The Needle's Eye, the Lens

Here comes the blind thread to sew it shut.

An Egg in the Corner of One Eye

I can only guess what it contains. I lean to the mirror like a teenager checking his complexion. Maybe it is sleep. Or a dream in which, like a bee or nursing mother or a radish, you eat to feed others. Or maybe it is a shard of light in the shape of an island from which dogs are leaping into the water, swimming toward a barking that only death can hear. On the eye's other shore life is upside-down. The dogs have swum for days to clamber up and, like an eye in its deathbed, shake out rays of light. Or maybe the light implodes. Or sinks into itself like a turned-off TV, the optic nerve subsiding like a snapped kitestring. I don't know. To open a tear is to kill whatever it was growing. I can't tell the difference between grief and joy. I tell myself that a tear is my death, leaking. In this way weeping resembles menstruation. The egg that will be fertilized never sees the light of day.

The Cat

While you read the sleepmoth begins to circle your eyes and then —
This is the weta sweater with legs that shakes in from the rain,
One afternoon napping under the light-
One night you lay your book down like the clothes your mother wanted you to wear tomorrow.
This is the same cat Plunder.
This is the cat with its claws furled, like sleep's flag.
(Continues…)

---

Excerpted from "Search Party"
by .
Copyright © 2004 Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

	Introduction	xvii
	Ruining the New Road
	The Search Party	3
	Psychoanalysis	5
	Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41	6
	Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP	7
	Jealousy	8
	Moving	10
	Lust	11
	Faith of Our Fathers	12
	Why We Are Truly a Nation	13
	On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen	14
	Driving All Night	15
	Oh Yes	16
	Old Girlfriends	17
	What You Need	18
	Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1959	19
	Yes!	20
	Sleek for the Long Flight
	Directions	23
	Sleeping Alone	24
	Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night	25
	Another Beer	26
	Night Driving	28
	The Needle's Eye, the Lens	29
	An Egg in the Corner of One Eye	30
	The Cat	31
	Talk	34
	La Tache 1962	35
	Snow	36
	Sleep	38
	Letter to Russell Banks	40
	Sticks & Stones
	The Portrait	45
	Mud Chokes No Eels	46
	Beer after Tennis, 22 August 1972	47
	Bring the War Home	48
	The Waste Carpet	49
	Sticks & Stones	54
	Rising and Falling
	Spring Snow	59
	Moving Again	60
	Snow Leopards at the Denver Zoo	62
	The News	63
	Strange Knees	64
	Living Among the Dead	65
	Left Hand Canyon	67
	In Memory of the Utah Stars	69
	Bud Powell, Paris, 1959	71
	Listening to Lester Young	72
	The Icehouse, Pointe au Baril, Ontario	73
	The Mail	75
	Taking the Train Home	76
	Waking at Dusk from a Nap	79
	In Memory of W. H. Auden	81
	Nurse Sharks	83
	Long	85
	Flood
	New	89
	Cows Grazing at Sunrise	90
	Housework	91
	Bystanders	92
	Twins	94
	Our Strange and Lovable Weather	96
	Descriptive Passages	98
	Good Company	100
	School Figures	102
	Pissing off the Back of the Boat into the Nivernais Canal	104
	The Penalty for Bigamy Is Two Wives	106
	Bmp Bmp	107
	Nabokov's Death	109
	On the Porch at the Frost Place, Franconia, NH	111
	Uncollected Poems (1967-1981)
	The Cloud	115
	Eternally Undismayed Are the Poolshooters	120
	The Drunken Baker	122
	Leaving the Cleveland Airport	123
	Dancing to Reggae Music	124
	Gossip	126
	Iowa City to Boulder	127
	Lions in the Cincinnati Zoo	128
	A Walk with John Logan, 1973	129
	Clearwater Beach, Florida, 1950	130
	Jilted	132
	A Happy Childhood
	Good	135
	Sympathetic	139
	Whiplash	140
	Bad	143
	The Psychopathology of Everyday Life	147
	Loyal	149
	A Happy Childhood	150
	Civilization and Its Discontents	156
	Familial	158
	Right	159
	The Theme of the Three Caskets	163
	Masterful	166
	An Elegy for Bob Marley	167
	Wrong	169
	Foreseeable Futures
	Fellow Oddballs	175
	April in the Berkshires	176
	Photo of the Author with a Favorite Pig	177
	The Accompanist	178
	Herd of Buffalo Crossing the Missouri on Ice	180
	Caddies' Day, the Country Club, a Small Town in Ohio	181
	Dog Life	183
	Recovery Room	184
	Black Box	186
	Vasectomy	187
	Blues If You Want
	Nabokov's Blues	191
	39,000 Feet	194
	Mood Indigo	196
	Housecooling	198
	Homer's Seeing-Eye Dog	199
	The Blues	201
	Moonlight in Vermont	203
	Smoke Gets in Your Eyes	205
	School Days	207
	Little Blue Nude	208
	Onions	212
	Straight Life	214
	Time & Money
	Grief	221
	The Wolf of Gubbio	222
	Mingus at The Showplace	223
	The Bear at the Dump	224
	My Father's Body	226
	Time	228
	President Reagan's Visit to New York, October 1984	232
	Mingus at The Half Note	233
	Men at My Father's Funeral	235
	The Rookery at Hawthornden	236
	Note Left for Gerald Stern in an Office I Borrowed, and He Would Next, at a Summer Writers' Conference	238
	Cheap Seats, the Cincinnati Gardens, Professional Basketball, 1959	240
	The Rented House in Maine	241
	Mingus in Diaspora	243
	Tomorrow	245
	Money	247
	The Generations	251
	Cancer Talk	253
	A Night at the Opera	254
	Uncollected Poems (1982-1997)
	Another Real Estate Deal on Oahu	259
	Slow Work	261
	E lucevan le stelle	262
	Portrait of the Artist as a Young Clarinetist	263
	Debt	264
	Condoms Then	265
	Condoms Now	266
	Phone Log	267
	Driving Through the Poconos, Route 80, 1:30 A.M., Snow	268
	The Buddy Bolden Cylinder	269
	The Memo	270
	Grandmother Talking	271
	Grandmother, Dead at 99 Years and 10 Months	272
	Names	274
	I Let a Song Go out of My Heart	276
	After All
	Mingus in Shadow	279
	Rescue	280
	Truffle Pigs	282
	Manners	283
	Promiscuous	285
	Sooey Generous	287
	Oxymorons	290
	Dire Cure	291
	Umbrian Nightfall	295
	The Cloister	296
	A Poetry Reading at West Point	297
	People Like Us	299
	Frazzle	300
	The Bar at the Andover Inn	301
	Big Tongue	302
	Bucket's Got a Hole in It	305
	Misgivings	306
	Care	307
	Index of Titles	309

Editorial Reviews

Like his beloved jazzmen, Matthews tried to make his craft sound easy; sometimes he succeeded too well. As the introduction to Search Party explains, a truly collected Matthews would include more than 800 published poems; this volume has just 165, with 26 previously unpublished in book form and 139 from his 10 earlier books of poetry, including the posthumous ''After All.'' Even in this selection by Sebastian Matthews and Stanley Plumly, the poems (especially those of the 1980's) become disconcerting in their professional fluency: Matthews, like a busy touring musician, completed each performance, and then moved on. — Stephen Burt

The New York Times

With 11 books of verse in less than 30 years, Matthews (1942-1997) established a secure reputation as a witty and trustworthy commentator on a particular bandwidth of his generation. His poems-most of all the touching semi-sonnet sequences of A Happy Childhood (1984)-spanned his own experience, from an Ohio small town to Manhattan literary life, with attentive excursions from Maine to Hawaii. Matthews had a way with quotable sayings: "Is love the reward, or the test itself?" His unpretentious free verse and his all-American topics recall slightly older poets such as Philip Levine, Donald Hall and Matthews's friend Gerald Stern. His work stands out, however, for his commitment to jazz, whose giants (most of all Charles Mingus) Matthews commemorates and imitates in off-kilter lines, most of all in 1989's Blues if You Want : "Music's only secret is silence," he wrote there, "It's time/ to play, time to tell whatever you know." His sudden death left a cluster of shocked admirers (including many literary gatekeepers), a posthumous manuscript (After All, 1998) and many uncollected poems. Maryland poet Plumly (Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me) and Matthews's son Sebastian (whose memoir Norton will also release in January) have teamed up to produce what is, despite its title, not a complete poems but an attractive selection, what Plumly deems "the best of" this wry and likable poet's work. (Jan.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

It's a real tragedy to have lost Matthews in 1997 at the relatively young age of 55, but at least we have his poems as consolation. There was always an edge beneath his insouciance, as evidenced by this magisterial collection. (LJ 1/04) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal