Sel Poem & Trans Matthews CL

This collection brings together more than 100 poems, chosen from eight previously published volumes, and 40 translations from the French, Latin and Bulgarian. The prodigious output is uneven. Matthews's ( Ruining the New Road ) work is well crafted and rich in imagery, but tends to be overly cerebral. The poet intellectualizes; he explains. Sometimes this tendency manifests itself in a surfeit of cleverness, as in the poem ``Funeral Homes'': The poem becomes a disquisition on a theme, the language puffed up. Happily, the poet fights his own worst tendencies. Influenced by Freud, he takes as his weapons memory and dreams. When Matthews recalls a specific experience, the poems edge on the anecdotal and nostalgic, as if he knew what he thought before he began the poem, and simply recorded that knowledge, prettily. But he also wants something else--to find ``a real lost child''--and his search takes on the second kind of memory, which includes risk and discovery, the psyche's uncovering of what wasn't consciously known. In his best work, Matthews enters new territory, producing a flood of language that traces the ongoing revision of perception. (June)