Strictly No Poetry

In these forty-eight remarkable individual poems and sequences, Mathews lays out his witness to the travails and joys of youth and old age, to the passing political parade and the intimacies of nature, to the exigencies of parenthood, of frailty and endurance. Informed by a Dublin sensibility, he holds fast to spiritual traditions while testing the parameters and indulgences of the modern world. His voice, by times Keatsian in its lyric penetration, is humanist in its instincts, universal in its reach, and exerts a singularity that leaves no shadow.