Matthew Welton

Off the Beaten Track presents new work by twelve writers taking part in a unique collaborative project: each of them was invited to compose one haiku per day for a month, thus contributing towards the total of 365 haiku for a full calendar year. Half of the authors are widely published writers of haiku, while the other half are almost (or entirely) new to the form. This situates the collection within the tradition of English-language haiku, while also seeking to extend its boundaries through the inclusion of ‘outsiders’ with respect to that tradition. Complementing the haiku are original illustrations by twelve artists, making the volume as visually striking as it is thought-provoking and diverse.

Award-winning poet Matthew Welton’s new collection continues his career-long playful, exploratory poetics as he tackles nature writing, drawing from a year’s walking in a city’s green spaces.

Matthew Welton is a poet enchanted by form and process. Many of the Number Poems abide by subtle patterns or constraints, creating symmetries in the arrangement of sentences, lines, words, or metrical feet. As with good architecture, however, Welton's rules and methods resist exclamation; rather, they are the framework upon which are established localised ambiances, be they of warmth or dazzlement, the home or the dream. Other sequences, such as the mind-altering 'Melodies for the meanwhile', begin with a palette of words and images and recombine them kaleidoscopically. By adding layers of colour and sound, Welton composes a modulating sensory wave. Even in silence, we do not so much read these poems as perform them.

From its title, which runs to 101 words in full, to its wordless concrete poems; from its World Cup fixture list to its transformations of four-letter words, 'We needed coffee but...' is audacious, mischievous, even outrageous. As in his award-winning first collection The Book of Matthew, the poet attends precisely to each detail: the rhythms are musical but unexpected; the brightness control on imagery is turned up high. New in this book is the emphasis on collaboration. Some of this work began in text pieces for art exhibitions or as song-cycle lyrics. Other poems respond to the influences of Gertrude Stein, Raymond Queneau, Inger Christensen, dom silvester houedard, Yoko Ono and Gyorgy Ligeti. Matthew Welton turns rigorous control into a dancing display of wit: we become his collaborators in the shared delight that inventive poetry can contrive.

Matthew Welton makes tunes out of words. Using the sounds and structures of language, he finds new understandings of what poetic form can do. He refuses to be constrained by convention. The title poem borrows its structure from Roget's Thesaurus to spin thirty-nine variations on sounds, images and rhythms, creating a puzzling, dazzling kaleidoscope of effects. The Book of Matthew is playful, witty and irresistibly memorable, expanding the attentive reader's awareness of the fabric of poetry and the possibilities of language. These poems give delight by means of the shape of the lines on the page, the feel of the words on the tongue, and the subtle noises they plant in the ear.