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PARTISAN REVIEW
Different from the coastal light of Justice's Southern Florida
and the sharp detail of Voigt's Virginia is the geography shaped by
the intelligence and wit of William Matthews's poems. Matthews is a
poet whose temperament bends toward the aphoristic and epigram–
matic: "Style is the rind of the soul we can persuade to die with us,"
or , "In writing, skill is the major share of courage." His diction,
which has always been preternaturally inspired and gleefully clever,
is as supple and inclusive as ever in
Foreseeable Futures.
Few poets
writing today can pull off with such panache the "dribble glasses"
found in the poem "Fellow Oddballs," or the "slow urinary hiss" of a
tape looping in the black box of a flight recorder, or the "coiled wir–
ing" of a severed vas deferens which a doctor is stuffing "back in like
a flustered motorist / struggling to refold a road map." Except in a
few places, Matthews is able to avoid the major risk of such writing,
which is its propensity to turn into glib and excessive patter.
Organized around a sequence of thirty fifteen-line poems
which also includes a half-dozen others of various lengths,
Foreseeable
Futures
is about the "very middle, the exact / fulcrum of our lives." At
this pivotal place Matthews fights the urge to take shelter in a com-
l
fortable nostalgia, but rather chooses to face the future, "joyless but
content," mindful that illness and death "wait for us / in the yard,
like shadows furled in bud ." To this end we often find the speaker of
his poems in need of repair or alteration - physical and spiritual-
and whose main concern is in providing evidence, to himself, that
his ailing body and soul are still serviceable artifacts. The patient in
"Recovery Room" works hard to demonstrate that feeling has re-
turned to his lower torso by coaxing a few bubbles of gas from his
bowels, "like a truculent champagne."
Although the future that Matthews foresees on the Styx side of
the fulcrum forever insults and humiliates us with its random
tragedies, he offers in our defense the dignity of a stoic and humor–
ous intelligence. The first requirement for acquiring such intelli–
gence is to give up regret and self-pity and to take on the fact of our
inelegant demise. The best we can do in such a situation is to meet it
with the unflappable equanimity of those pilots on Air Florida Flight
#7, whose last exchange, Matthews reminds us in "Black Box," was:
"'We're going down.' / 'I know .'"
MICHAEL COLLIER
