{"id":84421,"date":"2015-04-06T19:24:13","date_gmt":"2015-04-06T23:24:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=84421"},"modified":"2015-04-07T10:22:08","modified_gmt":"2015-04-07T14:22:08","slug":"april-in-the-berkshires","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/06\/april-in-the-berkshires\/","title":{"rendered":"April in the Berkshires"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

North Adams, Massachusetts, in April 1934.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cApril in the Berkshires,\u201d a poem by William Matthews from our Spring 1987 issue<\/a>. Matthews died in 1997. \u201cAuden was wrong,\u201d he said in a 1995 interview<\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s not true that poetry makes nothing happen. It tends to work its wonders in a very small arena. It makes you more interesting to yourself, and you and me, at its best … It has the power to perform a kind of cleansing, or rinsing of the sort for which for a long part of human history, we had only images of theological intervention to describe.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Dogs skulk, clouds moil and froth, humans
begin to cook\u2014butter, a blue waver of flame,
chopped onions. A styptic rain stings grit and soot<\/p>\n

from the noon air. Here and there, like the mess
after a party, pink smudgily tinges the bushes,
but they\u2019ll be long weeks of mud and sweaters <\/p>\n

before a finch dips and percolates through
the backyard air like the talk of old friends.
It feels like the very middle, the exact<\/p>\n

fulcrum of our lives. Our places wait for us
in the yard, like shadows furled in bud.
On the chill wands of the forsythia pale<\/p>\n

yellow tatters wave. How long has Mr. Forsyth
Been dead? Onto the lawn we go.
Lights, camera, action: the story of our lives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cApril in the Berkshires,\u201d a poem by William Matthews from our Spring 1987 issue. Matthews died in 1997. \u201cAuden was wrong,\u201d he said in a 1995 interview: \u201cIt\u2019s not true that poetry makes nothing happen. It tends to work its wonders in a very small arena. It makes you more interesting to yourself, and you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1188],"tags":[10692,17691,17690,17692,17689,1022,5014,7221,165,17688],"class_list":["post-84421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-from-the-archive","tag-april","tag-april-in-the-berkshires","tag-berkshires","tag-clouds","tag-issue-102","tag-nature","tag-new-england","tag-poems","tag-poetry","tag-william-matthews"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPoem: William Matthews\u2019s \u201cApril in the Berkshires\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A poem from our Spring 1987 issue.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/04\/06\/april-in-the-berkshires\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"April in the Berkshires by Dan Piepenbring\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"April 6, 2015 \u2013 \u201cApril in the Berkshires,\u201d a poem by William Matthews from our Spring 1987 issue. 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