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Reading Old Friends includes essays, reviews, and poems on poetics. Matthias, who has spent much time in England, concentrates on British poetry ranging from late modernist figures such as David Jones and Hugh MacDiarmid to contemporaries such as Geoffrey Hill, Seamus Heaney, Michael Hamburger, and John Fuller. He also seeks to establish, or re-establish, meaningful trans-Atlantic connections between Wendell Berry and Jeremy Hooker, for example, or between Robert Duncan and David Jones. Other, more generally acknowledged figures, are also discussed, including Wordsworth, Pope, Crabbe, Constable, Turner, Britten, Tippet, Lowell, Auden, and Berryman. The book also contains three poems on poetics that engage many of the theoretical issues left implicit in most of the essays.
"John Matthias is one of the leading poets in the USA at the moment. He is also an accomplished critic. These pieces are written in a congenial and civilized style. They are not 'criticism' in the current sense of tedious argument and defended theory. John writes for an audience that reads. Even so, there is a great deal of good criticism here, and the book will be reviewed as a critical tour de force. This is a lively book, an intelligent one, and one I think many will admire and find powerfully interesting." — Guy Davenport, University of Kentucky
"He is a unique talent, combining the experimental energies of modernism and postmodernism with an acute sense of literary form…These impulses emerge, variously but always engagingly, throughout the essays collected here." — Vincent Sherry, Villanova University
In reviewing Matthias' column "Not for Sale in USA," the Washington Post said of his poetry criticism, "Matthias writes with such gusto, knowledge, and love… Every word of this is exciting for anyone in the least interested in poetry."
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I: Old Friends and Old Selves
Reading Old Friends
Places and Poems: A Self-Reading and a Reading of the Self in the Romantic Context from Wordsworth to Parkman
Part II: Others
Poetry of Place: From the Kentucky River to the Solent Shore
W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten
Robert Duncan and David Jones: Some Affinities
Dai Greatcoat
The Later Poetry of David Jones
Such a Kingdom: The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill 1952-1971
Poet-Critics of Two Generations
Some Notes on the English Poetry of Goran Printz-Pahlson
Part III: Three Poems on Poetics
Turns: Toward a Provisional Aesthetic and a Discipline
Double Derivation, Association, and Cliche: From the Great Tournament Roll of Westminster
Clarifications for Robert Jacoby: "Double Derivation...," part iv, II. 1-10; part vii, II. 1-15, 22-28
Part IV: Not for Sales in USA, Some Poets of the 1980s
Anthologies of Contemporary British Poetry
Poet-Translators and Translator-Poets
Of Publishers, Readings, and Festivals: Circa 1986
Anglo-Welsh Poetry
Hugh MacDiarmid and Scottish Poetry
Scottish Poetry after MacDiarmid
Inside History and Outside History: Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, and Contemporary Irish Poetry
Part V:: After Auden, Some Poets of the 1970s
Michael Hamburger
R.S. Thomas and Edwin Morgan
Elizabeth Daryush and Barbara Guest
Jon Stallworthy
Paris Leary
Anne Stevenson
David Steingass
William Hunt and William Everson
John Fuller
Elizabeth Jenings and Peter Porter
John Cotton and D.M. Thomas
Notes