Time & Money
Late in his life, William Matthews left us withTime and Money,  winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. It is a meditation on loss and grace  that some of us will be thinking about for a long time. "Bob Marley's Hair,"   which discusses the famed musician's dreadlocks falling out during chemotherapy, is as  poignant as, well, "Babe Ruth at the End," the story of Ruth on his deathbed.  The real gem, though, is "Dead Languages," a study in how, to useFrost's expression,  "way leads on to way." Matthews tosses out fascinating examples of how  words have evolved, how "Live English lugs a dead language inside." The  way language mutates its way through the world, unconscious of its own changes,  Matthews writes, isn't far from our own dimly understood lives: "We did what we  did, we're / not proud nor ashamed, we led our lives / or they led us, and how would we  know which?"