Timothy Mathews

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New Chronicles of Art and Hope. Writing in times of demagoguery
MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE, 2026

Link to MA BIBLIOTHÈQUE’s website



Memoir, notes from…, letters to…, fiction and fictions, non-fiction, creative non-fiction, make-believe and reality TV, autofiction, prose and verse, the free and the metered, rhyme, reason, and rhythms, breath, moments and quotations, chronicles, stories of our time and whose time, witness, ways of seeing far longer imposed than exposed, the boundaries of art, why art at all?

New Chronicles for Art and Hope is a collection of poetic essays, free verse, and prose poetry. The rhythm of their passing gives tender antidotes in the mind to the whirlwind of victims and tyrants, the brutality of administered fear, signalling something of the swooping charisma of demagogues, and the vulnerability it feeds.

‘These are the artefacts of a listener, of a mind grown into its own maturity refusing to submit to the world it inflects, a voice that cannot be separated from its own resonance, and a plea, or would it be merely a signal, that writing can still exist, can still issue a call for itself, can gently manifest its own fragile existence in a time of great horrors and unassayable trauma.’
–> Ansgar Allen

‘In an era of fractured identity and political noise, Timothy Mathews delivers a healing without: a stunning ekphrastic collage that dissolves the boundary between the gazer and the gazed. Traversing museum galleries and the jagged realities of current affairs, these chronicles invite us into the unbound. Through a tapestry of memoir, prose, and marginalia, the text unfolds the constructedness of the human subject, urging us past the self to find a community of shared horizons. Here, the demarcations that divide us evaporate into a solidarity forged in loss. This is a radical literature of solace, transforming our modern melancholic state into a shared, selfless freedom.’
–>  Ágnes Lehóczky



Table of Contents


A few of my favourite…                                                          

Extracts from healing without                                                    

What would I say now?                                                                                                            
: unbound                                                                                

As stories you might tell                                                              

       Ritornellos Slippy & Shiny                                              

       Violence Wills Love - Two Poems for Nancy Spero              

               In fragments there echoes

               Thinness and sparsity

       Who where when

       Just write as stories the ones you might tell                      

Make   Shift   Echo   Life                                                       
Embossed on the social fabric                                                      

On wonder, lament, and becoming                                              

In which way does delusion lie?                                                   

10.01                                                                                      

She Voices If  

Please read    
The look of the words on the page, the sound of them in the ear, the rhythms of their interaction within each piece and over the book as a whole, together signal the rhythm of the book’s indirect voyage into the smelting of demagoguery and vulnerability: vulnerability to the demagogues of our time, their psychic appeal, the textures of their magnetism, their power to seduce; their capacity to feed the inner vulnerability of anyone, in ever more charismatic swoops of molestation and glee. The varying looks and rhythms of these pages match the way I was experiencing, grappling with, writing with vulnerability, exploitation, and contempt, also resistance, and the entwined lyricisms of pain and generosity. The tones of loss continue to shimmer in the pages of this book, at the outer edges of its loose chiastic shape. They have shown me my path to the magnificence of what lies beyond, which shocks and glows and beckons, and which has turned into the poetic essays, the free verse, and the prose poetry offered to you here, in this commonplace book, this scrapbook with a shape, these chronicles of art and hope.


Timothy Mathews, from ‘A few of my favourite…’, 
the overture to the book

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