Harry Mathews’s Drifts and Returns


"There are two ways, at least, into 'Cool gales shall fan the glade,' the last poem Harry Mathews completed and the first one included in Harry Mathews Collected Poems: 1946–2016. One is to read it as a twilight soliloquy: a wandering rumination on a long life richly lived, filled with loves and lusts and leisure and loss, shaped by many wandering ruminations before this one. Another is to read it as an experiment on a French fixed form from the fourteenth century called the sestina, with the supplemental rule that the words concluding each line, instead of merely repeating in spiraling permutation, add a letter and rearrange themselves into new words with every stanza: at becomes fat becomes fast becomes feast. These two ways are not mutually exclusive, I don’t think; perhaps, to hear Harry Mathews in the poem as I hear him, it is necessary to travel both at once. ..."
The Paris Review
LitHub: Few Were As Devoted to Poetry and Friendship as Harry Mathews
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2017 February: Harry Mathews, 2019 July: Redux: Sulfurous Coils of Red and Green

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