Jwara Mali
Flames and Flowers by James Matthews (Realities)
The poem is a story as well. In Flames and Flowers, James Matthews seems to take us through the story of his life. There is a narrative element, however slight, in the treatment of this poet’s themes: “Dorfman/ I have eaten the bread of your pain/ and sipped the blood of your suffering/ shared the agony of death’s visitation/ have joined the chorus of the bereaved … / I am companion to the horrors you know.”
Matthews’s ability to concentrate language and find images that communicate his feelings and ideas to the reader is well achieved in this book. He suddenly transfers us from the level of history to the level of action. Here is a close-up: “are the people’s poets/ coerced into party poets/ their verse that sustained/ people in their rage/ … now structured into sycophantic/ symphonies lauding the new elite”?
Major concerns of Flames and Flowers are rebuilding and reconciliation, at both the individual and group level. It is about the new relationships brought about by change. It is a significant meditation on the quest for a new self and a new society, where we can all recuperate after the displacements and dislocations that all such questing entails.