There’s a sweetness at the root of these poems that must come from growing toward the light touch of observation on things fragile and profound, a tenderness in tending light itself as though light were a kind of perception. These poems are happy to be earthly, friendly with abstraction, and able to hold nighthawks for whom darkness is water, and rain that pecks at a hat. This collection, where lives are multiple, where love holds everything up, comforts and celebrates beautifully.
–Kathleen Peirce, author of many beautiful books, most recently, Vault, with New Michigan Press.
There’s a certain importance hovering over the images in Mike Matthews’ poetry where reality meets haiku, meets the greatness of the moment, so full of details and hereness. At times you are born lightly into fairy tale worlds close to the one we inhabit. Other times the poems are very explicit and philosophical, even meditative. Perception is sliced and the smell is important and the notion of observing. Metaphysical and philosophical with meta and hereness fluently soaring, these poems also announce the coming of existential angst with a real flair for poetic expression.
–Bengt O. Björklund, author of I Missed Woodstock, Human Error Press, MA, Singing in My Chains Like the Sea, Iconau Publishing, Wales, and I, Middle Creek Publishing, CO.
In this collection, Mike Matthews’ poems define the spaces “Between something and the nothing that is also something—” as they navigate between darkness and light, air and water, form and formlessness. In these undefined spaces where form fades and darkness envelopes both the speaker and his world, Matthews transcends his understanding of self, as a body immersed in water and a spirit learning to be at peace with itself. These poems explore worry and indecision, but ultimately override them with a path to tranquility and an acceptance of simplicity.
–Brian Cordell, author of In Their Final Performance, Finishing Line Press.
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