John Matthias

Northern Summer

New and Selected poems, 1963-1983

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.…

Battle of Kosovo

The Battle of Kosovo cycle of heroic ballads is generally considered the finest work of Serbian folk poetry. Commemorating the Serbian Empire’s defeat at the hands of the Turks in the late fourteenth century, these poems and fragments have been known for centuries in Eastern Europe.…

A Gathering of Ways

A Gathering of Ways is John Matthias’ first collection of poems since the publication of his warmly received Northern Summer collection in 1985. The book consists of three long poems dealing with the geography, geology, prehistory, and history of two places closely identified with Matthias’ work, the East Anglian region of Britain and the American Midwest, and a third place that provides the book with a new and deeply resonant setting: those parts of southern France and northern Spain through which run the famous pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.…

Beltane at Aphelion

Longer Poems

Beltane at Aphelion collects all of John Matthias's longer poems and is published simultaneously with Swimming at Midnight, which collects his shorter poems. The volume includes his exuberant experiments from the 1960s, Poem in Three Parts and Bucyrus, followed by The Stefan Bathory & Mihail Lermontov Poems, his comedic diptych from the 1970s set on a Polish and a Russian ocean liner, and by Northern Summer, his meditation on history and language set in Scotland.…

Swimming At Midnight

Selected Shorter Poems

Swimming at Midnight collects the short and middle-length poems from John Matthias’s earlier books together with twenty poems that have previously appeared only in magazines. It is published simultaneously with Beltane at Aphelion, which includes all of Matthias’s longer poems.…

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New Poems and Cuttings

A unique voice among contemporary American poets, John Matthias has compiled here a major new collection, his first volume of poetry since the publication in 1995 of his retrospective collections of shorter and longer poems.…