{"id":5163,"date":"2025-09-06T03:45:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-06T03:45:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/5163\/"},"modified":"2025-09-06T03:45:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-06T03:45:11","slug":"matthew-mcconaugheys-new-book-poems-prayers-reviewed-by-pico-iyer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/5163\/","title":{"rendered":"Matthew McConaughey&#8217;s New Book, &#8220;Poems &#038; Prayers,&#8221; Reviewed by Pico Iyer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> Poems &amp; Prayers by Matthew McConaughey <\/p>\n<p>Faced with the title Poems &amp; Prayers, an innocent reader might well think back to the Morning Homilies of Pope Francis. Sure, the late Pontiff never brought down the house in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. Nor was he\u2014in public, at least\u2014to be seen playing the bongos in the nude. But he might easily have begun one of his soulful petitions, \u201cWhat do I forgive and where\u2019s the buck stop here?,\u201d even if less likely to continue, \u201cBeen forty-eight days since I had a beer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Lovers of literature will recall that Matthew McConaughey\u2019s <a href=\"https:\/\/airmail.news\/issues\/2020-10-24\/the-playboy-philosopher\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Greenlights<\/a> shot to the top of the best-seller lists five years ago\u2014it\u2019s sold more than six million copies worldwide\u2014as the Oscar-winning actor mixed the wisdom of Seneca with accounts of how his dad breathed his last while riding his mom. \u201cI\u2019ve had many people give me poems that I did not know I wrote,\u201d he confessed, disarmingly, at the outset, having just told us that he once enjoyed peyote while stuck in a Mexican cage with a mountain lion and (in an unrelated incident) had 78 stitches sewn into his forehead by a veterinarian.<\/p>\n<p>      <img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" class=\"img-small\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/air-mail.png\"\/><\/p>\n<p>      Enter your e-mail to read the full story for free<br \/>and to receive our weekly e-mail newsletter<\/p>\n<p>Or, <a href=\"https:\/\/airmail.news\/subscribe\/promo-AMLD5025\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">subscribe<\/a> to AIR MAIL and get access to our entire archive. For a limited time, get 50% off your first year during our Labor Day Sale!<\/p>\n<p class=\"mt-5 text-center text-md\" data-paywall-capture-target=\"intro\">\n    Or <a href=\"https:\/\/airmail.news\/AMLD5025?from=Mghazj\" data-turbo=\"false\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">subscribe to AIR MAIL<\/a> for full access. Start your free trial today.\n  <\/p>\n<p class=\"mt-5 mb-0 article-card-text text-center\" data-paywall-capture-target=\"existing\">\n    Already a subscriber? <a href=\"https:\/\/airmail.news\/subscription\/sign-in?from=Mghazj\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Sign in here<\/a>\n  <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Poems &amp; Prayers by Matthew McConaughey Faced with the title Poems &amp; Prayers, an innocent reader might well&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5164,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,6807,4223,6808,111,139,69,6809,6810],"class_list":{"0":"post-5163","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-greenlights","11":"tag-hollywood","12":"tag-matthew-mcconaughey","13":"tag-new-zealand","14":"tag-newzealand","15":"tag-nz","16":"tag-pico-iyer","17":"tag-poems-prayers"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5163\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}