Acoustic Shadows
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Acoustic shadows - sound suppressed in such a way that even General Grant was deceived by one at the Battle of Iuka in the American Civil War - complicate the lives of many figures appearing in these poems, including that of the young John Matthias at his grandfather's house on Iuka Drive in Columbus, Ohio in the 1950s. This book, Matthias's first volume of entirely new poems since Complayntes for Doctor Neuro (Shearsman, 2016), includes a group of short lyrics followed by an essay called "Some Zones" (about places in which a kind of imaginative clarity becomes possible) and two longish sequences, "Prynne and a Petoskey Stone" and "First and Last Opinions," dealing with the American Midwest from the perspective of an English poet's Cambridge, and the Ohio Supreme Court opinions written by Matthias's father and grandfather. The title poem concludes the volume by bringing together memories and documents relating to the poet's great-grandfather, especially those pertaining to Civil War battles in which he fought alongside the famous and mysterious Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil's Dictionary, who disappeared in Mexico in 1913.
John Matthias was born in 1941 in Columbus, Ohio. For many years he taught at the University of Notre Dame and continues to serve as poetry editor of Notre Dame Review. He has been a Visiting Fellow in poetry at Clare Hall, Cambridge, and lived for much of the 70s and 80s in East Anglia. His books of verse include Turns, Crossing, Northern Summer, A Gathering of Ways, Swimming at Midnight, Beltane at Aphelion, Pages, Working Progress, Working Title, New Selected Poems and Kedging. He has also published translations from the Swedish, editions of David Jones' work, and a volume of literary criticism, Reading Old Friends. In 1998 Robert Archambeau edited Word Play Place, a selection of essays on Matthias's work. Another book of essays on his poetry appeared in 2011 in the Salt Companion series, edited by Joe Francis Doerr. Since 2010, Shearsman has republished all of his poetry in the volumes Trigons (2010), Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 2 (2011), Collected Longer Poems (2012), Collected Shorter Poems Vol. 1 (2013) and Complayntes for Doctor Neuro (2016). In 2011 Shearsman also pubished an essay collection, Who was Cousin Alice?, and followed this with another, At Large, in 2016.