The Ground That Love Seeks
Paul Matthews. Five Seasons Press, 1996.
Katie Lehman and Tom O'Connor
"Poetry is a path as well as a pleasure," writes English poet Paul Matthews, whose recent book of poetry, The Ground That Love Seeks, explores the need for a language in which the imagination works to transform the human spirit. A quoted preface by Robert Duncan describes a possible spiritual awakening through poetry and also echoes his commentary on H.D.'s poem Heat, which divides poetry into two orders: the first encompassing that which "we must know all about if we [are] to be accomplished students," and the second embodying what he found in H.D.'s poem: "a personal revelation" encapsulating "the ground for a possible deeper communion." Paul Matthews' poetry belongs to this second order, containing the ground where hope and healing can exist-when all difference and similarity in language, in people, and in experience come together in an interconnected form.
Matthews chooses for this ground a language which must shape itself through the poetic imagination. In the first section of the book, "The Grammar of Darkness," he strives for a meaningful communication in which language can overcome the destructive forces we face in our everyday lives. In the poem "Blank Pages," the fear of annihilation challenges his self-awareness as he stares at a blank piece of paper:
anxious
no word of my own
should smear it.
Impossible.
This will to create, arising in the poem, is both within himself and within the horse who "bounds into the meadow." This impetus in nature for movement is the same force in his writing: "he rears against my hand as I write this." The poet's risk to create must challenge the nothingness which opposes it.
The poetic energy released through Matthews' language bears a resemblance to the imagism of H.D.'s work. Matthews' poetry creates a natural object and subject, enmeshed together in a language where objectivity and subjectivity become one being-the poem, itself an alchemical creation. Exemplifying this in the poem "The Verge," he again challenges the nothingness which is a precursor to any creation:
Because it's impossible
that the Rose be spoken
speak
and at the verge unfurl
perpetual crisis
where the heart fails
or that red sustains it.
This poem wonders at human nature's inherent struggle acknowledging that:
at this verge where all systems fail
poetry begins
We start imagining.
Just as William Carlos Williams believed that the writing of poetry is not an elevated event but one grounded in everyday occurrence, Matthews' poems embody a similar presence:
Who are you?
in a turnip field.
No words
but the eyes ask it.
In Matthews' poetry, the eyes ask sight to tell beyond telling; words ask language for the communion they seek. "Beyond wharves and words, /beyond every ache and lack" exists a name worthy of the risk and anguish necessary in the quest to discover it. In order to succeed the poet must abandon a preconceived knowing:
No one really enters a wood
unless they are prepared
to give up their language.
This abandonment implies a trust that a new or unknown language will replace the outworn pattern. In the second section, "The Fabulous Names of Things," the poet revels in the delight of language's ability to metamorphose human consciousness, creating new connections: "Welcome to the stone that has no mouth to cry with. Welcome to the leaf that trembles on the edge of speaking."
In the third section, "The Ground that Love Seeks," Matthew implores language to create a "purpose in the mind" and to then find "God's ground to stand on." This section ends in a meditation on the developmental stage of childhood, and launches the fourth section, "The Long Grass of Childhood," in which he surveys fragmented memories and the miraculous ability children have to create myth in the natural world. In these poems there is the remembrance of "a fierce perfection," and a "river in flood," as well as "springtime fields" where to be lost is "to find yourself." The poet must risk the desolation of being lost and, like the child, trust again in his true relation to a strangely familiar world. In the poem, "The Path of the Poets," Matthew incorporates a child's trust: "Let go let go and give yourself / into the hands of women."
His last section, "In Yielding," finds hope in the foundation of a spiritual path. The poet's life is invigorated by the Feminine, by his family and by his own quest for spiritual awakening. He presents the ultimate offering of his work to the world in the poem "Go, My Songs":
Go, my songs, and beg
forgiveness from the ones
you brought into confusion.
And:
Go, my songs. The air
upon the open field
is reft of melody.
The ground that love seeks is only realized through the risk that is required by both writer and reader in discovering through poetry a personal revelation. The accomplished student would do well to read Paul Matthews' work and to risk as much.