Some Other Where

Description

Some Other Where is about steps and missteps, disconnection, and connection, both in relationships and between ourselves and the world. Matthews’s poems, which have been described by Bernard O’Donoghue as ‘life enhancing,’ embody those sudden jolts when we see our lives differently. Work here touches on the climate crisis, on how the ancient past speaks to our present lives, and on moments glimmering with the extraordinary and the sacred.

‘Questions of now and then frame the spatial and temporal concerns of Some Other Where. Always attuned to nature, these poems are deeply implicated in the stories they arise from and the role they play in the now. In many ways, though beset with loss, these are fraught love poems addressed to nature and creativity that carry a solicitude from the personal to the universal. Always precise and un-laboured, the poems become suddenly familiar and necessary’ – John Kinsella

‘Some Other Where is a fine and echoing new collection, a kaleidoscope of scene and thought and feeling that together tumble and resolve in a series of vivid and deeply personal encounters with the past. In the interplay between his elegiac evocations of absence and his vital sense of historic presence, Matthews carves a hauntingly poetic space in which his searching imagination comes movingly and musically alive – not least in the superb final fantasia sequence “The Valley of the Temples”’ – Jane Draycott

From reviews of On Magnetism:

‘…intriguing in its sudden, enigmatic sensuality’ – Poetry Salzburg Review
‘Matthews attends to moments at their most lived’ – Stand

Steven Matthews. Paperback, 210 x 135 mm, 80 pages, April 2023.

About the author: Steven Matthews is a poet and critic from Colchester, Essex. He was an inaugural poet in residence at the Natural History Museum, Oxford, in 2015-16. His previous poetry collections are Skying (Waterloo Press, 2012) and On Magnetism (Two Rivers Press, 2017). A selection of his museum poetry was included in the anthology Guests of Time (Valley Press, 2017).