After the Body: Poems New and Selected, Cleopatra Mathis
Eric Hoffer da Vinci Eye winner
New England Book Awards Finalist
The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: July 2020”
From her first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, published in 1979, Cleopatra Mathis has given us poems that somehow manage to be elegant and visceral at once. What has changed in the progression of the six collections since then—in poetry addressing marriage, the mystery of animals, the delicate and indelible bonds of family, illness, and mortality—is that the visceral quotient has steadily increased, though the elegance remains undiminished. For Mathis, the natural world no longer provides the affirmation and solace it once did; the navigation of a darkened hallway at night is a perilous expedition. After the Body charts the depredations of an illness that seems intent on removing the body, piece by piece. Through close and relentless observation of her own physical being, Mathis shows us how miniscule ambition, planning, and a sense of control over our own bodies are—things we so blithely take as real and solid when healthy. Her many publications, awards, and praise from peers testify that she is a lyric poet of the highest order. This expansive new book reflects a brilliant career, and is a necessary addition to any collection.
Additional Info
Cleopatra Mathis was born and raised in Ruston, Louisiana, and has lived in New England since 1980. She has published seven previous books of poems, most recently Book of Dog and White Sea, both from Sarabande Books. Her many awards and prizes include a Guggenheim Fellowship, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and two Pushcart Prizes. Her poems have appeared widely in journals, magazines, and anthologies, including The New Yorker, Threepenny Review, The Georgia Review, Best American Poetry, and The Extraordinary Tide: Poetry by American Women. The founder of the creative writing program at Dartmouth College in 1982, she lives with her family in East Thetford, Vermont.
PRAISE FOR AFTER THE BODY:
"Over the last four decades, Mathis (Book of Dog) has quietly crafted lyrically precise, often harrowing poems in which the poet’s “throat is a long avenue of ice,/ cutting the familiar good words/ at their source.” This generous volume draws from the poet’s recorded gifts and losses: poems of early and late motherhood, a child’s mental illness and institutionalization, human and nonhuman deaths within and beyond the poet’s purview. . . .In these knowing poems, readers may recognize their own humanity, as well as the sometimes-impossible conditions of living."
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
"An excellent collection that leads with her new poems, finely attuned to the body and aging."
—The Millions, “Must-Read Poetry: July 2020”
"[D]eeply moving, beautiful."
—Literary North, online
"In reading this superb collection, I was often reminded of the closing of Randall Jarrell’s ‘90 North,’ a poem of doubt and regret that somehow manages to quietly triumph over its bitterness. ‘Pain comes from the darkness. / And we call it wisdom. It is pain.’ Mathis’s poems, like so many of Jarrell’s, insist that pain and wisdom are often bafflingly symbiotic: they have learned to live with this injustice, and do so with a bravery and emotional depth that is sadly rare among contemporary poets."
—On the Seawall
“Beginning with her astonishing first book, Aerial View of Louisiana, in 1979, and now with her moving and poignant group of new poems, Cleopatra Mathis has surveyed and charted with ever-increasing lyric concision and dramatic intensity ‘the ritual ground work’ of human need. From book to book, Mathis demonstrates how memory extends its ‘first claim’ to include not only the mythic richness of her childhood in Louisiana but also the contrasting and complicating joy and grief of her life in New England as a transplanted Southerner. The resolute heart and keen human insights found everywhere in After the Body: New and Selected Poems renew the ‘claim’ many readers of contemporary American poetry have made for decades, that Cleopatra Mathis is one of our most important and essential poets.”
—Michael Collier