Poets and Poems: Matt Duggan and "The Kingdom"

Memory, and memories, can become tangled in the reality of current experience. The backyards or gardens of the homes we grew up in somehow shrink over the years. Beloved teachers age and retire. Images and scenes from vacations or holidays rarely remain how we remember them. Even books and poems seem to change over time, becoming sometimes less and sometimes more impactful and profound. 

A high school English teacher once told me class that you needed to read Don Quixote by Cervantes three times – once in youth, once in middle age, and once in old age, because, she said, the book would change. I’ve read it twice – in youth and middle age – and discovered she was absolutely correct. Reading it at 40 was not the same as reading it at 17.

Poet Matt Duggan is no stranger to how memory gets tangled. His latest chapbook, The Kingdom, is about, among other things, returning to what’s past, and wondering if the past never really was. Too often it’s not what we remember it to be. And we feel a loss.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Matt Duggan and “Woodworm”

A woodworm is the name given to the larvae of a fairly wide array of beetles. It’s also the name applied to a condition of wood when the larvae have been having a meal. What look like holes are more like entrances to small caves, carved into the wood as the larvae eat their way forward. 

But the title of a poetry collection?

I saw the name of British poet Matt Duggan’s latest poetry collection, Woodworm, however, and thought not of wood beetles but of Wormwood, the young student being tutored in The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Both thoughts might be relevant, however. Duggan writes about the flaws in ourselves and the surrounding culture that, sometimes slowly and sometimes quickly, eat their way through. And, like Lewis’s Wormwood, we are being taught in these 60 poems, not how to promote and capitalize upon the flaws but more to be aware of the havoc the worms of our culture are creating.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poets and Poems: Matt Duggan and “A Season in Another World”

AIn his new chapbook A Season in Another World, British poet Matt Duggan takes on a journey. The 21 poems in the collection use words as a kind of travel guide, whether it is to look through the window of time, or arriving in Venice and its Island of the Dead, or wandering through a dark forest. These are poems steeped in legend, myth, fable, and fairy tale; where else does a dark forest “leak bare light” but in a fairy tale?

Duggan has been previously inspired in his poetry by myth and legend. His 2011 collection Underworld: The Modern Orpheus was a retelling of the legend of the musician and poet who could charm all and also served as one of Jason’s Argonauts, looking for the golden fleece. The poems of A Season in Another World are less concentrated on one theme or character but display a strong sense of connection with myth.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.