Time and Money

William Matthews's ten books have gradually earned him a place on the first roster of American poets -" as water licks its steady way through stone." " Very little of the poetry of the past twenty years," Henry Taylor has written in the Washington Times, " is more intelligent and engaging than that of William Matthews . .. Admiring gratitude seems perfectly appropriate." The New Yorker has described Matthews's work as " poems that revel in etymology and delight in colloquialism." And Carol Muske, in The Nation, has added: " If asked, I couldn't come up with a poet more in tune with the ironies and stand-up vernacular, the jazz of the everyday, than William Matthews . . . Matthews is a wise and fine poet and a funny person. Like time and money, an unbeatable combination. " This is a large-hearted book, a strong and worldly book, the work of five years by one of the most admired and generous of American poets. The National Book Critics Circle named it the winner of its 1995 award in poet

Publishers Weekly

Things that don't last occupy Matthews in his 10th collection, coming after 1991's Selected Poems and Translations. These 40-plus poems, nearly all previously published, refract irony into an unexpectedly broad spectrum-from the pitch of despair to pale diffidence. Showing a diversity of style, from the incantatory momentum of ``My Father's Body,'' describing the physical processes that follow the death of this ``mild, democratic man,'' to the reflectively grateful notes of ``Landscape with Onlooker,'' Matthews probes what passes-lives, love, certainty and, often, music. Poems about Mingus, Pavarotti, even Bob Marley, weave through the volume's three sections and, like other moments sharply remembered (``In the Boathouse'' and ``President Reagan's Visit to New York, October 1984'') seem to capture the poet's emotional attention at the least remove. Humor, brittle or forgiving, is also generously offered: ``that was how I thought/ poetry worked: you digested experience and shat// literature...'' he writes about his 17-year-old writing self; yet in a later poem, he gives credit to ``...the erotic thrall/ of work as restraint against despair.'' The best of these poems are powerful, brave and lasting. (July)

William Matthews won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association in 1997. Born in Cincinnati in 1942, he was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. At the time of his death in 1997, he was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.