Matthew Brennan • The House with the Mansard Roof

Link to:  Article Regarding The House with the Mansard Roof by Andrew De Haan

Link to:  Matthew Brennan Interview by Andrew De Haan

Matthew Brennan’s impressively wide-ranging new volume marks a major imaginative breakthrough for an already fine poet. Mixing personal memory and cultural history, Brennan’s poems incisively chronicle the joys, sorrows, and astonishments of a now vanished Twentieth Century America.
   • Dana Gioia

I have greatly enjoyed reading this fine collection, especially the poems that in agile ways stand upon the shoulders of the life of the past. Brennan is a masterful craftsman and his work is a gift.
   • Ted Kooser

No matter how plainly these poems start, from a painting by Vermeer or Ben Shahn or a WPA print, or the light at dusk or dawn, or noises in an old house, Matthew Brennan rolls them over in the connections they attract, and before we know it they have conjured up a fully furnished world of objects, feelings, memories, forms, and loves, and show us what’s involved in being son, grandson, father, lover, divorced, married—human! It’s as if to say if you focus intently enough on anything in your world, the deepest meaning of your life will emerge, in concrete images and tough, accurate, uncompromising language. ”This is a beautiful book.”
   • George T. Wright

About the Author:

Matthew Brennan was born in St. Louis and educated at St. Louis University High. He earned a B.A. from Grinnell College and Master’s and Doctoral degrees from the University of Minnesota. He is the author of two previous collections of poems, Seeing in the Dark (1993) and The Music of Exile (1994), as well as the verse-narrative The Sea-Crossing of Saint Brendan (2008). His poems have appeared widely in such publications as Poetry Ireland Review, Notre Dame Review, South Dakota Review, Poet Lore, Sewanee Review, and Blue Unicorn. He has also written two critical studies—Wordsworth, Turner, and Romantic Landscape (1987) and The Gothic Psyche (1997)—and has contributed articles and reviews to South Carolina Review, South Atlantic Quarterly, Sewanee Review, Georgia Review, The Wordsworth Circle, English Language Notes, and other journals. In 1999, he won the Thomas Merton Prize for Poetry of the Sacred. He lives in Terre Haute with his wife, Beverley Simms, and teaches at Indiana State University.