John Matthias'sNew Selected Poems brings together both short and longer poems from eight previous books. It ranges from early lyrics written in America during the 1960s to meditative and epistolary poems deriving from his years spent in England during the 70s and 80s, formal experiments engaging issues of poetics, and sequences likeNorthern Summer,Facts from an Apocryphal Midwest,A Compostela Diptych, andCuttings. Robert Duncan called his early poetry "the work of a Goliard-one of those wandering souls out of a Dark Age in our own time," and Guy Davenport has said that his recent work makes him "one of the leading poets in the USA." The present volume, together withWorking Progress, Working Title, published by Salt in 2002, makes almost all of his major work available in Britain for the first time in many years.