Pure Filth

Pure Filth, Aidan Mathews’ extraordinary fifth collection of poems, forged during a pandemic, finds clarity through the cheerfulness of paradox. In sickness and in health, for better and for worse, these sixty-seven verses invite us to cherish imperfection as our only pure and possible ecosystem. As finite creatures, he holds, we must choose our infinitives with care. Making do is always the aim in this world, but muddling through is often the outcome.

Critic and biographer David Wheatley says, ‘Mathews does not have themes so much as obsessions. If his Catholic faith provides the ground base for all his work, sexuality, mental illness and the Holocaust recur in poem after poem, stitching together the quotidian and the extreme.’

Fellow novelist and poet Adam Thorpe writes, ‘Aidan Mathews has long been a favourite of mine, whether in poetry or prose. Switching from Dryden to an An Lar bus-ticket, from grafitti in Pompeii to “the wild cat lake of Galilee”, the poems are electric, febrile, startled by their own energy. Not for the faint-hearted.’

In their focus and singularity, Mathews’ poems are proof of a vision that reconciles the secular and the liturgical, history and happenstance, the cosmic and the familial, bringing delight and wonder to our ‘incorrigibly plural’ world.