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. The two books together represent some thirty years of his work. The poems in Swimming at Midnight range from early lyrics written in American during the late 1960s to meditative poems dealing with historical, geographical and cultural themes deriving from Matthias's years in England in the seventies and eighties; they include the epistolary poems from Turns, "Poem for Cynouai" from Crossing, "A Wind in Roussillon" from Northern Summer, and the formal experiments engaging issues of poetics and metaphysics for which Matthias is well known. The book concludes with a section of new poems and translations dealing both with the public world of modern history and the private experience of life in the century's final decade. The last poem of all connects the work in Swimming at Midnight with the last of the long poems in Beltane at Aphelion. Critics have been warm in their praise of Matthias's work. Robert Duncan called his early poetry "the work of a Goliard-one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time," and Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him "one of the leading poets in the USA." D. M. Thomas in the TLS admired the "virtuosity" of Turns and the way "life presses into the poems," while John Fuller in the same journal found the poems in Crossing "bursting with a masterful intelligence." In a long essay on Northern Summer, Jeremy Hooker wrote: "In his combination of lyrical and discursive voices, as in subject and concern, Matthias has an exciting range...He writes in some poems from a tension between a scribe's respect for the integrity of his materials and a magician's freedom to transform them, and in many poems he brings together the contrasting gifts and is fully present as himself, both scribe and magician."

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.

At Large takes its title from John Matthias' "Editor at Large" column published during the last decade in Notre Dame Review. The book is in some ways a sequel to his previous volume of essays and memoirs, Who Was Cousin Alice? And Other Questions (Shearsman Books, 2011). Like that book, At Large contains a series of personal essays, many of which also involve literary commentary, along with literary essays that retain the flavor of memoir. Subjects include memories of an early poetic apprenticeship, family history, backgrounds for his novel Different Kinds of Music (Shearsman, 2014), as well as longer and more formal pieces about "poetry of place"; the work of Basil Bunting, Tomas Transtromer, David Jones, Robert Duncan, and Hugh MacDiarmid; the fiction of poets; poetry in film and opera; and the literary dangers of finding "religious feeling" in texts that are really dealing with secular emotions. At Large also functions as a kind of anthology, reprinting excerpts, with Matthias' introduction, of John Peck's book-length poem Cantilena (Shearsman, 2016) and James Walton's unpublished novel The Progress of Romance. The book contains two interviews, the author's with Larry Siems, former free-speech trouble-shooter for American PEN and a former student, and Joe Francis Doerr's three-part conversation with the author. It is a book full of variety and surprises, one of them an illustrated lecture on the collaboration between screen siren Hedy Lemarr and avant-garde composer George Antheil as they appear in Matthias' poem-play, Automystifstical Plaice: A Spread Spectrum Cabaret.

Complayntes for Dr. Neuro is John Matthias's first volume of poetry since Shearsman's publication of his three volumes of collected poems in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The present book, ending with the title sequence about being forced to confront some of the very neurological problems in fact which have in many earlier poems been something of a theoretical pre-occupation, also represents the more experimental side of his work that has tended to preoccupy the critics who have written on him over the past three decades, along with translation-based work (Virgil, the Chinese Shijing, Rimbaud), a run of austere shorter poems, many of an elegiac cast, and some graffiti-like riffs. Matthias has always written in several styles, and those are once again on display in this volume. The notes include an important gloss on the title poem, 'A Poetics of Parkinson's.'

Different Kinds of Music follows Timothy "Westy" Westmont through six episodes from his childhood and youth, through his experiences as an archivist and a thief, to encounters with William Faulkner's bear in St. Louis, Hemingway's lingering ghost at Walloon Lake in Michigan, and Phillip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus in Columbus, Ohio itself. The narrative is sometimes funny, sometimes sad; and it progresses in an order more interesting than the merely chronological. Between the episodes appears a sequence of interchapters about music, the different kinds of which define Westmont's experience from the 1940s to the turn of the 21st century in an idiom different from that of the narrative parts of the book. Different, too, is the final long chapter, "Westmont as Talbot Eastmore," in which the author of the previous five episodes tells his own story in terms of a miniature bildungsroman which is also an elegy for an old friend.

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ The 'J.B. Gough' Series Of Temperance Dialogues adapted From His Speeches]. John Matthias

Chronologically the first, Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 1 is editorially the third of John Matthias's three-volume Shearsman Collected Poems. It includes the poems that first made Matthias's reputation-experimental work like 'Turns: Toward a Provisional Poetics and a Discipline'; politically activist poems from the 1960s and '70s such as his elegy for the Kent State University students killed by the Ohio National Guard; poems written from his fifteen years of living off and on in Suffolk; poems articulating an aesthetic of play-and-game like 'Clarifications for Robert Jacoby'; along with several epistolary poems, explorations of place, and family-oriented lyrics, such as the often translated and reprinted 'Poem for Cynouai.' This volume joins Collected Shorter Poems, Vol. 2 and Collected Longer Poems in bringing together all of the poetry, with the exception of Trigons (available separately from Shearsman), that Matthias wishes to preserve.

The second volume in the Collected Poems of John Matthias, following Vol. 2 of the Shorter Poems in 2011, this volume covers all of the author's long poems from before 2010. That year's Trigons is excluded and remains available from Shearsman. Texts included in the book are: Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest (1986); Northern Summer (1980-1983); The Stefan Batory Poems (1973); The Mihail Lermontov Poems (1976); An East Anglian Diptych (1990); Cuttings (1995); Pages: From a Book of Years (1998); Automystifstical Plaice (2000); Laundry Lists and Manifestoes (2003) and Kedging in Time (2006).

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ++++ The below data was compiled from various identification fields in the bibliographic record of this title. This data is provided as an additional tool in helping to ensure edition identification: ++++ The Principles Of Morals, Volumes 1-2; The Principles Of Morals; Thomas Fowler Thomas Fowler, John Matthias Wilson Clarendon Press, 1886 Ethics

This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

The first volume to be released in an ongoing project collecting all the poems of John Mattthias. Two volumes of shorter poems and one of longer poems will form the complete package and, with this initial release in the year that the poet turns 70, these books will bring back into a print a major body of work that readers on both sides of the Atlantic need to know better.