Slippery Characters

In this first gathering of his poetry since The Ground That Love Seeks (1996) Paul Matthews explores aspects of biography "at the verge of the mythological". Writing of his strong experiences in the mountains of California, at Ephesus, on the holy island of Lindisfarne, he is keenly aware that the words and alphabets under his pen come charged with the fibs and fables of millennia back, a more than personal will which must be wrestled with, surrendered to at times, as he shapes his present purposes. The dynamic relationship between word and world is central to this book, the "slippery characters" of its title being both the mythological, historical, human and animal beings that inhabit these pages and the written characters themselves whose images and gestures spring to life through the emblems and letterings created by Katharina Kubin.