"A Gathering of Ways" is John Matthias first collection of poems since the publication of his warmly received "Northern Summer" collection in 1985. The book consists of three long poems dealing with the geography, geology, prehistory, and history of two places closely identified with Matthias work, the East Anglian region of Britain and the American Midwest, and a third place that provides the book with a new and deeply resonant setting: those parts of southern France and northern Spain through which run the famous pilgrimage routes to Santiago de Compostela.
An East Anglian Diptych...

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.

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).

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...