About The Book

Richard Matthews was the winner of the 2001 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and his”poems possess a wonderful, illuminating intricacy”(Nicholas Christopher).

In his first collection of poems, The Mill Is Burning, Richard Matthews brings to bear an astonishing range of poetic modes and voices to explore landscape internal and external, light and dark, real and fanciful, near and remote. These are poems distinctive in both their lyrical and emotional urgency and their intelligence and craft.

Matthews does not flinch from difficult subjects. In”Cavafy Suite,” he re-imagines and relocates poems by the celebrated Greek poet to create a harrowing tour of the labyrinths of depression. The sequences”Ad Astra” and”Tenebrae” are beautiful but painful portraits of D. H. Lawrence and the poet’s mother, respectively, approaching their deaths. Yet he also gives us poems of celebration–of redemption through music in”Of Mere Virtuosity,” of a distant lover intimately conjured near in”Cloister”–and poems of wonder, as a dragon drops from the sky in medieval France, moths blanket Penelope’s Ithaca, and a Rothko painting morphs into a lush Korean landscape.

Challenging and moving, Matthews’s poems enlarge our intellectual and sensory engagement with the world. This is a rich and original debut.

Praise

‘remarkable. . . . Matthews takes the reader on exploratory voyages through different cultures and periods. . . . He invokes a highly cultured range of references, most of them pursued to deep emotional levels. . . . The way Matthews voices and verbalizes images also recalls another famous Latin tag by Simonides of Keos, that may be translated as “Poetry is a speaking picture, painting a silent poetry”. . . . Matthews manages the feat of assimilating Asian culture as thoroughly as any Western poet since Arthur Waley. . . . A pensive and sometimes brooding poet acutely aware of legacies of war. . . . Matthews’ insights ring true because he has looked and listened with receptivity and perception. More than merely a promising author, Matthews is a poet who has kept promises to art and to himself.” –Benjamin Ivry, Denver Quarterly

“Thick with color and texture. . . . Matthews emotes via an impressive variety of voices, using his imaginative powers to give depth to worlds and times he, as well as the reader, could never logically or spatially exist in. . . . In these poems one receives the purest sense of emotion, a glimpse inside that reflects the face of the human condition.” –Andrew R.

Excerpt

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