Publisher's Synopsis
"Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was among the most inventive and unorthodox writers of his generation. His novels earned comparisons to Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon and bear the mark of one who learned "never to settle for results that are merely reassuring." But Mathews was a poet first, and he prized poetry for its transformational and redemptive power. Collected Poems: 1946-2016 gathers seven prior collections, together with poems never before published in book form. Poems dedicated to John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, James Schuyler, and Kenneth Koch show Mathews's origins alongside the poets of the New York School. Others reveal his obsession with the puzzles that animate the Oulipo, the famous French fraternity of writers and mathematicians, in which Mathews was the sole American member. But Mathews's work transcends these affiliations. His maverick avant-gardism is all his own, nourished by wellsprings of romanticism and metaphysica
