After All（ISBN=9780618056859）

　　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, the author of a dozen books of poetry, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for "Time & Money" in 1995 and, in 1997, the Ruth Lilly Award of the Modern Poetry Association. He was born in Cincinnati and educated at Yale and the University of North Carolina. At the time of his death he was a professor of English and director of the writing program at the college of the City University of New York. 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 oddities.

　　"A lovely finale." (Library Journal )"An extraordinarily important American poet." -- Gerald Stern"Well-rounded, well-sequenced, textured, multidimensional, mature--these are adjuectives a reviewer doesn't often get to use. But they characterize "After All: Last Poems". Matthews was so good he could fall into a snit and still make a respectable day's work of it. (Bill Christophersen, Poetry )