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Page 22 American Book Review Verga continued from previous page Is that about Coltrane? Sure, of course it is, and it’s also brilliantly about all of us. Here’s a white flute player in an otherwise all black combo: sitting in, only white guy on stage, who screams into his flute an extended riff on the absence Of beauty.… Or as he says in another poem, “I’m here, you shout, I’m fucking here.” A lot of these poems take place in places that some people might deem exotic, New Orleans, Chicago clubs, downtown spots, or out of the way venues “in a neighborhood taxis don’t come to.” American places. Places where souls and revelations pop open. “No, I am sure it was recognition I saw / clouding his face. He went down quick, he said. / He didn’t know what hit him.” At the growing edge of things and people, significant things happen, any good poet knows this.At the edge of form, themes sound and resound. Some poets know that. A few poets make this truth clear to everyone who hears them. Matthews has a way of putting things that demands quotation: at the outer rim of the inner circle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …like at a railroad crossing, horns knock together like boxcars. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . …You leaned in to remark on vertigo, how it can overtake you when you’re out of your element. This poet’s lyricism is a gravitational field big enough for the reader to get pulled into. From a poem set up to be “about” Sonny Rollins called “Undressing the Muse,” here’s the final stanza: That’s what I want now: less stage, more bridge (the wind steady and relentless) and room to go about the private business of becoming— nothing more, not a single iota less— who I am meant to be. We Generous is the best first book I have read in the last four or five years. Unburdened by but respectful to his ancestor, Sebastian Matthews has made fine poems and placed them into settings that force the listener/reader to notice things. Like jazz, like all good poetry, these pieces tease and promise much, and then, against the odds, and overcoming much resistance (I admit I do not as a rule like poems about music or paintings or dance) actually deliver illumination and pleasure.An openness to the world, an acute aliveness that could, just maybe, make us better than we are or at least act as if we’re better than we are. And Matthews makes us grateful too. Matthew’s lyricism is a gravitational field that pulls readers in. Let’s go out with a few cuts from “What Love Is,” the last poem in this impressive debut collection . You could tell he was a Marsalis brother…. . . . . . . Jazz was in his blood…. . . . . . . . . . . . . holding forth on the subject of “cuttin’,” that fraternal pissing contest…. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Later, when Delfeayo plays the loveliest solo on “You Don’t Know What Love Is” I ever heard (heroin slow, each note laid out like an early morning baker sets out a rack of bread loaves) the place gets church quiet, drinks clinking as we listen in on a one-way lover’s plea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I tried to tell my friend something of the feeling that had taken hold of me, stumbling over the words like a greenhorn sitting in…. . . . . . . . we crossed over onto Canal, head bent in reverie for all the night had offered up in its swell. Sebastian Matthews is about as greenhorn as Dante was while following his poetic father Virgil through an underworld. In this impressive and wellcrafted first book, this younger Matthews has taken his seat near the center of what is strong, and clean, and useful in contemporary American poetry. Angelo Verga is the author of 33 New York City Poems (Booklyn, 2005) and four other collections. He curates literary programs at the Cornelia Street Café and teaches poetry workshops in uptown New York Public Library branches. liBerAl renAissAnCe Kevin Mattson ameriCan liBeralism: an inTerPreTaTion for our Time John McGowan The University of North Carolina Press http://uncpress.unc.edu 288 pages; cloth, $29.95 Does anyone besides me get annoyed when...

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