The Book of Matthew

Reviews / Votes

'It arrives with a unique and distinct sensibility; his poems create their own evocative and elusive worlds. There is a kind of relaxed quizzical sensuality running throughout, an easy, compelling confidence.'
The Guardian 'I'm also eagerly awaiting the publication of The Book Of Matthew by Matthew Welton but I'll have to wait until September. He's a poet who has consistently (but slowly) produced some stunningly beautiful work - but this is his first complete book.'
Dave Gorman, The Observer Wilton Carhoot, The Slab, 2003

I'd like to invent a poetry prize and name it, 'The shimmery, glittery prize for slabtastic, slaboroo, euphonious poetry, which for some reason that I can't quite put my finger on, makes me feel happy.' I'd like to award it to, Matt Welton Esquire. This book is a wow, and I wouldn't be doing my job properly if I didn't try to put my finger on that that it is that I enjoy so much about this book. The main strength of this book is in its obsevance of metre and format. There are strict rhyme schemes, mostly fully end-stopped, it refreshes me to see this, surely I'm not he only one out there who sees a clever enjambment and thinks gee whiz pass the salt. As great as Armitage and Duffy are, it's a shame that we now have a generation of Armitage and Duffy wannabees. Find your own voice, like Matt. Welton seems to have put his nose to the grindstone as far as the craft of poetry is concerned. The results are startling, I'm sure I saw some distorted villanelles and cleaved sestinas, this is great, format moved forward, dynamite shoved under the poetry manual. I'm sure Welton could take a Yorkshire pudding recipe, mix it into a pantoum and the results would be imaginative and linguistically interesting.

[...]

It is a happy book, a real joy, and it's not often you say reading poetry is a sheer joy. I think it is underpinned by Welton's use of positive language. How could you not like a poem titled 'The Fundament of Wonderment' or 'This is Delicious to Say'? It deserves to do well, but we don't think you'll find it in many branches of Waterstones, Borders or Tesco (they sell books don't they) which is a shame because in our book, right now, he is a lot more important than Rudyard fucking Kipling. Saturday 19th June 2004

It's slowtime



Charles Bainbridge welcomes the unique sensibility of Matthew Welton's first collection, The Book of Matthew.

Matthew Welton's first collection, The Book of Matthew, is something of an achievement: it arrives with a unique and distinct sensibility; his poems create their own evocative and elusive worlds. There is a kind of relaxed quizzical sensuality running throughout, an easy, compelling confidence. Welton likes to slow everything right down ('slow' and 'slowly' are two of the most repeated words in the book). The ensuing stillness fosters an attention to subtle physical distinctions, to patterns and repetitions.

In an undergraduate essay from 1865, Gerard Manley Hopkins says that the essential quality of lyric poetry should be considered 'as regularity or likeness tempered by irregularity or difference'. He is picking up on a point made by Coleridge in which the latter stresses the importance of 'lyric repetitions and sublime tautology' before going on to quote the following example: 'At her feet he bowed, he fell, he lay down; at her feet he bowed, he fell; where he bowed there he fell down dead.'

The accumulation of echoes and repetitions builds up to the dramatic impact of that final word. And here is Welton in the poem 'Writing 21', delighting in a lighter, more comic version of the same technique:

What Hannah has, Liat has and what Hannah has

some mornings in the hills in terracotta bowls

is apple-coloured melon halves she eats with glee.

The holes below the hills are full of sleeping bees

and Rafi hovers off alone as sunlight falls,

Liat says, Hannah says. A cloud comes slowly by.

The phrases, the lines, are musically constructed, the repetition subtly building up to the effect of the last short sentence. This is like a relaxed version of Hopkins. Although its insights come through a slowly savoured sensuality rather than through the impact of intense excitement, it still believes that repetition and variation are at the heart of the lyric.

This idea of repetition is carried much further in the second half of the collection, in which a single poem goes through a process of 38 variations and alterations. The reader gets a sense of the immense range of vocabulary that can be employed within a single piece, and part of the pleasure of the sequence is the temptation to try to second guess the variations Welton pursues. The whole thing is a parody of the idea of le mot juste imbued with the influence of Lewis Carroll.

In fact, throughout the book Welton loves to play verbal games that are redolent of Carroll. Various Victorian poetries are continually being sifted through the influence of 20th-century American writers. How about this for a post-Beat take on the opening of Christina Rossetti's 'Goblin Market':

Vodka, she likes. Whisky also. And plums. And limes.

And lemon-peel. Fried fruit. Dry beans. Deep soup. Warm cream.

Welton's fascination with sly organisations and subtle numerical systems means that at times there can be something a little ornate about his work. Unlike a poet such as Wallace Stevens, who has clearly inspired him a great deal, Welton can lack a sense of roughness, of dissonance. However, his best poems avoid this either through sheer gusto and verbal play ('President Marbles') or through an impressive melancholic restraint, conveyed across long, atmospheric stanzas in which a more intuitive and gentler sense of surprise is allowed to flourish ('Hubba'):

And here at last, alone, we fill our coffee cups

and, standing at the window in the kitchen-lounge,

we find it easier to see how one thing slips

into another, simpler to believe in change,

and difficult to know for sure if what we feel

is autumn coming on or summer at its close.

At night we notice tiny birds circling the hill,

the echo from the road, the wind among the stars.