“Topophilia,” wrote Auden, himself a poet particularly attuned to landscapes, “differs from the farmer’s love of his home soil and the litterateur’s fussy regional patriotism in that it is not possessive or limited to any one locality.” The poet John Matthias, a consummate topophile, has, over the past two decades, put down roots in English soil as deep as those that bind him to his native American Midwest. His affinity for historical, cultural, and natural landscapes of England is complemented by an exceptional sensitivity for the most subtle rhythms and tones of British poetry. In Reading Old Friends, Matthias turns his firmly grounded poetic intelligence to a wide range of English and American poets and critics, as well as to Turner, Constable, Britten, and the historian Francis Parkman.
Matthias charts his development as a poet in the two most personal essays in this collection, “Places and Poems” and “Poetry of Place.” He describes how he learned to “take the measure of [a] place and find [his] proper station in it” by opening himself to the “full geological, topographical, natural, historical, and social context” of the region. He quotes liberally from his own poetry, demonstrating the gradual change in poetic voice from that of an anxious outsider to that of a poet “at home in the world.” In the process, Matthias deepened his understanding of poets whose work was inspired by the spirit of place, even one as foreign to his Poundian sensibility as Wordsworth.
Matthias’s best