This edition is not for sale to customers in the US & Canada.

Northern Summer' is a representative selection from John Matthias's previous books, together with a group of poems written since 1980. Robert Duncan wrote of his first book, `Bucyrus', that in part "Matthias is a Goliard - one of those wandering souls out of a dark age in our own time."

The present selection includes the three epistolary poems from `Turns' - hailed as "major art" by Arthur Oberg in `Western Humanities Review' - as well as the long "Poem for Cynouai" from `Crossing', which extends and modifies their idiom. The book reprints in its entirity The Stefan Batory Poems, written on a Polish liner while Matthias travelled to America after a year in England during the last stages of the Watergate controversy, along with three sections of The Mihail Lermontov Poems, written two years later while returning on a Russian ship to England.

The comic vision of these poems has been widely acknowledged since the publication of `Crossing', a book the TLS found "bursting with masterful intelligence" and `Thames Poetry' called "packed with poetic thought, devilment, and complexities of spirit."

The new work in Northern Summer' culminates in the title poem, a personal and historical meditation set in Scotland. In it a new landscape and history - that of Fife and "The Matter of Scotland" - join the East Anglian and mid-western American concerns of his earlier work. It is a poem that bears out Neil Corcoran's observation in `PN Review' that Matthias is a poet "whose exceptionally original work has something of David Jones's magpie eclecticism and much of his sustaining interest in specific re-imagined historical occasions."

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