Miracle Day: Mid-Life Songs (2012)
Miracle Day: Mid-Life Songs
Poetry
Miracle Day explores the main themes of midlife; sex and death, marriage and parenthood, work and play, friends and foes, travel, and staying put.
Moving back and forth between couplets and the single-stanza poem, Matthews writes about the world he is immersed in, whether listening in on an impromptu barbershop quartet with his son or driving through urban Philadelphia on a misguided whim.
Matthews continues his interest in jazz and musicians but has broadened his palate to include ruminations on everything from the 1948 summer session at Black Mountain College to Jack Benny’s legendary corn-belt comedy routines.
104 Pages | Available in Paperback | Published March 2012
Praise
Sebastian Matthews’ poetry has an enviable and light-hearted spontaneity. He has a voice and an eye that act like Velcro, picking up all the sights and sounds around him. His way of looking at the world without withdrawing from it, acknowledges and allows itself to be haunted by memory but still expresses and articulates true gratitude for the present. Taken as a whole, his poetry is a moving record of how music through time, words through time, and people through time connect and console us.
-Jennifer Grotz, Director of Bread Loaf Writers' Conference