William Matthews had completed AFTER ALL shortly before his death, just after his fifty-fifth birthday, in November 1997. In many poems in this collection, Matthews seems to be looking his last on all things appealing: music, food and wine, and love among them. He also evokes the death of his favorite jazz musician, Charles Mingus, speaks of cats, dogs, history--and especially, with his characteristic relaxed wit, of language and its quiddities.
William Matthews won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1995 and the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association in 1997. Born in Cincinnati in 1942, he was educated at Yale University and the University of North Carolina. At the time of his death in 1997, he was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the City University of New York.
"An extraordinarily important American poet." -- Gerald Stern
"A lovely finale." Library Journal
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