The Mill Is Burning (Grove Press Poetry) - Softcover

Matthews, Richard

9780802138866: The Mill Is Burning (Grove Press Poetry)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0802138861 ISBN 13: 9780802138866

Publisher: Grove Press, 2002

In his first collection of poems, The Mill Is Burning, 2001 Pen/Joyce Osterweil Award winner 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. "[Matthews's] delightful poems rove the world and its history and move us...into a distinctive sensibility." -- Billy Collins "...the general effect is one of passionate mastery...gratitude and enjoyment are the sole residue." --Richard Howard

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About the Author:

Richard Matthews was born and lives in New York City. He is a graduate of the writing program at Columbia University. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Drunken Boat, Western Humanities Review, and PEN America, and his reviews have appeared in Newsday. He is the editor of the newly revived Translation magazine.

Die M�hle Brennt—Richard
(After a painting by Georg Bazelitz)

When the red chair suspended in air
grazes the top of your head
and the white pitcher that rests on the chair

neither falls nor spills, you will move
to the window, or the empty space
in the wall left by the guns on the hill

just outside the city, and be amazed
at the mill ablaze in the distance,
the loud report of dry beams knuckled

under heat, the carousel of shadows spun
around the orange center of the flames,
because you know this cannot happen here

or because you know the mill’s been on fire
for so long that the city’s been consumed
entirely, and the heat from the mill

has blistered the red paint on the chair
and dried the water from the pitcher,
and, if you wait one more instant,

afraid that it is too late, it will be too late,
and the chair and pitcher will drift
through your hair as ash.

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