Appreciation …

… Bye-bye, NY. (Hat tip, Rus Bowden.)

… I’ve long held a torch for Mathews’s poetry, which I first encountered through Armenian Papers: Poems 1954-84 and a pamphlet from 1974, The Planisphere. The early poems are filtered through a Mediterranean dazzle, featuring a pastoral locus amoenus closely associated with marriage, as in ‘The Pines at Son Beltran’, where ‘the high pines bend/Seaward in slow acknowledgment of mountain wind’ and a ‘square stone’ table is ‘set with blue figs’.