Crossing

This title of the American poet John Matthias' second English volume suggests both continuity and change. The first two sections continue the idiom of "Turns" (1975) and include many poems on English themes. The two concluding sequences chart voyages across the Atlantic; they are as 'extravagant, eclectic, polyglot, and original' as his earlier experimental poetry, but more accessible in their narrative and humour. D.M. Thomas wrote of John Matthias' last book in the T.L.S., '"Turns" encompasses the order of art and the painful or grace-giving accidents of life; seriousness and wit; America's present, Russia's Stalinist yesterday, England's distant past; experiment and tradition. Mr. Matthias is eclectic, polyglot, often abstruse...But excessive virtuosity is forgivable in our stark poetic scene, and I admire very much the way life - his own and other people's - presses into his poems. He has something to say and a way of saying it. "Turns" is an exciting, richly promising collection'. "Crossing" bears out that promise.