POEMS OF MICHAEL MATHIAS
THE SILENCE
Written for the 40th Anniversary of The Glow magazine.from POEMS GIVEN IN SILENCE
Lagoon Cabin Series
My Blind Musiciansfrom VISION FROM THE BRIDGE OF FIRE
the Advent of AvatarMeher BabaVI. INITIATION: Temple of Blood
VII. THE DIVINE THEME
XII. THE KISS OF BLISS
XIII. HAZRAT BABAJAN
XIV. THE KISS OF HAZRAT BABAJAN
XVI. POEM OF FIRE
XXII. PATHWAY OF FIRE
EPILOGUE: O Tree of White Weddingsfrom THE COSMIC MOUTH
Autobiographical Journals, Part One
John T. Shawcross, University of Kentucky:
Michael Mathias is a very talented poet, playwright, actor, and musician, who continues to develop and grow as an artist. His morerecent activities have taken him firmly into areas of multimedia in which he has employed all these gifts. He has been recording some of these activities on audio-video tapes, sometimes with himself as reader or actor or pianist and sometimes with input from others in music or dance sequence/interpretation.
He aims at producing a full range of interrelated interpretations of his poetry in other media, while offering readings which engage both the emotions and the mind. His presentations lead one to read carefully the texts one has just witnessed or heard, or to reread them as the case may be.
VISION FROM THE BRIDGE OF FIRE has been one of his major achievements, even in its first version, but its continued expansionrefocuses it as both a whole and as an unending panorama of life and the life of ideas. What is perhaps most amazing about this work is its sweep of literature and literary history, pulling into close junction many great writers and writings of the past with the effect of rethinking those writers alongside others who provide substance for the poem.
The amount of research into the lives of the writers involved and the analyses of those lives yields more than simply a biographical or narrative retelling: we are made to rethink those authors and their biographies and the writings which resulted from the history of their minds. Some of the juxtapositions will startle because we had not in any way made any kind of connection before---for example, examining Henry Thoreau and then pursuing James Joyce.
What Dr. Mathias creates is an unending trove of ideas and reassessments of the content of his work, but actually that means a reassessment of ourselves. He is given to high flights of fancy, yes, and he employs a vocabulary that has peculiarities unto him (from, for example, the language of Hindic mysticism in his portrayals of the lives of Tagore and Meher Baba), but they are offered up in a dramatic monologue or dramatic interplay of characters that chases our attention and does not let go.
The epical work of Michael Mathias has grown from mythic and transcendent explorations of life and its meaning to mystic and visionary comprehensions of humanity and its complex interrelationships with all peoples. This is a unique poem---no, poem is delimiting; incarnation---and will speak to the mind and the heart like no other I know, unendingly.
John T. Shawcross
University of Kentucky
Author of Milton, The Self and The World, January, 1994
New York Times: "The best biography of Milton written in the twentieth century."The Cosmic Mouth is based on the collected poems from the epic, Vision from the Bridge of Fire, A Journey to the Spiritual City, in threebooks, published by D. G. Wills Books, La Jolla, CA, U.S.A.
Book I: Ierlandis, 1995
Book II: What Beethoven Heard in the Last Quartet, 1996
Book III: The Advent of Avatar Meher Baba, 1994Portions of Vision from the Bridge of Fire were originally published inThe Awakener Magazine, GLOW International and Resonance Magazine.