Swimming
at Midnight
(Ohio University Press, 1995)
John Matthias in Collaboration
with
Douglas Kinsey
Artist Douglas Kinsey and I have
collaborated on many projects for more than forty years. Doug has provided
monotype illustrations and jacket covers for several of my books, and we have
done readings and exhibitions together, most recently in collaboration with
Jean Dibble’s poster poems featured on X-Peri in January, 2016 http://x-peri.blogspot.com/2016/01/john-matthias-and-jean-dibble-hij.html,
three ago at the University of Notre Dame Rare Book Room. The present drawings
were part of that joint presentation.
I have long admired a unique
edition of Dylan Thomas’s Collected Poems
with drawings by Welsh artist Ceri Richards in the margins. This was published
by Enitharmon Press in 1980, edited by Richard Burns. I showed Doug a copy of
this edition and asked him to make some drawings in the margins of my 1995 volume
of poems, Swimming at Midnight. That
book was chosen, among many other possibilities, mainly because it had the
widest margins among my publications, the most white space. Doug’s drawings are
much more finished than the sketches Ceri Richards made in Thomas’s Collected Poems – Richards did his all
in a single day – and in no way influenced by them. Some of Doug’s – the
drawing in the margins and facing blank page of the title poem and the swimmers
drawn in the white space of the table of contents – are especially
masterful. At any rate, Doug and I are
very happy that this collaboration can now be seen by more people than were
able to page through the book itself at Notre Dame.
—John Matthias
