MEAD, Matthew

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Nationality: British. Born: Buckinghamshire, 12 September 1924. Military Service: British Army, 1942–47, including three years in India, Ceylon, and Singapore. Family: Married Ruth Adrian. Career: Editor, Satis magazine, Edinburgh, 1960–62. Has lived in Germany since 1962, currently in Bad Godesberg. Address: c/o Anvil Press Poetry, 69 King George Street, London SE10 8PX, England.

Publications

Poetry

A Poem in Nine Parts. Worcester, Migrant Press, 1960.

Identities. Worcester, Migrant Press, 1964.

Kleinigkeiten. Newcastle upon Tyne, Satis, 1966.

Identities and Other Poems. London, Rapp and Carroll, 1967.

The Administration of Things. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1970.

Penguin Modern Poets 16, with Harry Guest and Jack Beeching. London, Penguin, 1970.

In the Eyes of the People. Edinburgh, Satis, 1973.

Minusland. Edinburgh, Satis, 1977.

The Midday Muse. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1979.

A Roman in Cologne. Edinburgh, Satis, 1985.

A Sestina at the End of Socialism: And Other Final Verses. Ampleforth, York, Satis, 1996.

Other

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Shadow Land: Selected Poems of Johannes Bobrowski. London, Carroll, 1966; revised edition, London, Donald Carroll, 1967.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Generation, by Heinz Winfried Sabais. Edinburgh, Satis, 1967.

Translator, with Ruth Mead and others, O the Chimneys, by Nelly Sachs. New York, Farrar Straus, 1967; as Selected Poems of Nelly Sachs, London, Cape, 1968.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Generation and Other Poems, by Heinz Winfried Sabais. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1968.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Amfortiade and Other Poems, by MaxHölzer. Edinburgh, Satis, 1968.

Translator with Ruth Mead, Horst Bienek. Santa Barbara, California, Unicorn Press, 1969.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Elisabeth Borchers. Santa Barbara, California, Unicorn Press, 1969.

Translator, with Ruth Mead and Michael Hamburger, The Seeker and Other Poems, by Nelly Sachs. New York, Farrar Straus, 1970.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Selected Poems, by Johannes Bobrowski and Horst Bienek. London, Penguin, 1971.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Mitteilungen/Communications, by Heinz Winfried Sabais. Dammstadt, Roether, 1971.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Socialist Elegy, by Heinz Winfried Sabais. Darmstadt, Roether, 1975.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, From the Rivers, by Johannes Bobrowski. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1975.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, The Tightrope Walker, by Christa Reinig. Edinburgh, Satis, 1981.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, The People and the Stones, by Heinz Winfried Sabais. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1983.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, The Raven, by Gunter Bruno Fuchs. Edinburgh, Satis, 1984.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Shadow Lands, by Johannes Bobrowski. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1984.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Songs from the Old Folk's Home, by Christian Geissler. Edinburgh, Satis, 1988.

Translator, with Ruth Mead and Eva Hesse, Selected Poems 1957–1987, by Horst Bienek. Greensboro, North Carolina, Unicorn Press, 1989.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Doors of Smoke, by Wolfgang Bächler. Edinburgh, Satis, 1991.

Translator, with Ruth Mead, Flamingo Dance, by Urs Oberlin. Edinburgh, Satis, 1991.

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Critical Studies: By Christopher Middleton, in London Magazine, 1964, and in Neue Deutsche Literatur (Berlin), February 1965; by A. Kingsley Weatherhead, in The British Dissonance, Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1983; "The Poetry of Matthew Mead" by Dick Davis, London, PN Review, #42.

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Matthew Mead has been spoken of as a modernist, a social critic, and a poet who is proletarian and unacademic. On the contrary, his qualities are those of literary accomplishment. He can turn an epigram or a ballad as well as anyone writing today. The reader may feel his way through deliberately fragmented homages to Ezra Pound or Robert Creeley to light upon such finely tooled verse as this:

Bodies are rolled from bed to scuffed slippers
and day stiff-jointed; in sense repetition;
in spring one more spring; the figure
in a worn carpet traced with a dull eye.
 
And the house old, the wind's sound, each ache
lent art and length, given due weight
the dragging footfall. For this are we bent
and gnarled and wrinkled—to cross the room...

It is not that Mead is an escapist; his translations of Bobrowski, done in collaboration with his wife, would assure us of that. Rather, he is a Poundian in a sense deeper than that of technical allegiance, an aesthete distressed by the blood and chaos of totalitarian Europe. The poem quoted, "To Redistort a Weltanschauung," comes from his retrospective collection Identities. Here is an extract from The Administration of Things:

What she herself believes
No man alive conceives
 
We tell the lawful tale
(All fictions else must fail)
 
And loyal beyond the lie
Nor daring to deny
 
That what we have she gave
We make of what we have
 
Lending it length and art
Embellishing each part
 
A faith to ravage noon
With phases of the moon...

It is clear that writing such as this resembles nothing so much as the more Elizabethan lyrics of John Donne—"But come bad chance / And we join to it our strength / And we teach it art and length / Itself o'er us to advance …"—or the more lapidary verse of Andrew Marvell—"Caesar's head at last / Did through his laurels blast / … And if we must speak true / Much to the man is due …" In Mead's original work there is a gap between subject and presentation. Those who have followed his work with interest all these years hoped that he would turn this characteristic hiatus to dramatic use. Or if not that, they wished him to find a range of subject matter suited to the cool detachment of his technique.

—Philip Hobsbaum