According to the Small Hours (Cape Poetry) Book

According to the Small Hours is a clever, dense, and learned collection of poems on the connections between the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the everyday. Mathews intricately weaves into his religious sense of life, half- remembered, half-forgotten stories of private, personal experience, exploring how such moments are both mediated and withheld by faith, transformed in countless ways by the mystery of God. That faith connects what is momentary and passing to what is enduring and eternal, and is expressed through a wrought, metaphorical style, sometimes chant, sometimes oratory, but always keen to see the material world verified by the workings of spirit. Mathews' poetry stakes it claims here, treating each word, each phrase, as if it were also a symbol of transformation, like the parables he holds dear. Occasionally this leads to a tortuous opacity of reference and symbol in which clarity is sometimes lost or diminished. At the same time, the pervasive doubling or quadrupling of meaning forces the reader to engage with how those figures of spirit are alchemied into a source of overlapping, intertwined deliberations on love and faith. The burdens of such invention are, however, more than matched by a formal dexterity which, when it works, "is seamless. It is something else"("Wearings"). --David MarriottRead More