Sanctuary

Macabre, surreal, and wondrous, the poems here travel cities, landscapes, and the interior worlds of thought and dream.

He is by turns hilarious and subversive, a master of the cheekily surreal, whose conspiratorial mateyness often conceals a grinning skull

Very individual, imaginative, fresh work... The poems are disquieting, odd, dark, beautifully honed and cadenced

Always original, genuine and generous, Matthew Sweeney's poetry has matured to the point where its artistry can be recognized. He's brilliant on stories that disclose the strange, the ironic, the sad

Here are the small and great truths of the imagination that bursts forth out of our daily lives. Sweeney's poems are reflective, funny, supremely inventive and impeccably written. This is contemporary poetry at its very best

Matthew Sweeney was born in Donegal. Apart from his poetry, he has written children's fiction and edited three anthologies, Beyond Bedlam (with Ken Smith), Emergency Kit (with Jo Shapcott) and the New Faber Book of Children's Verse. Cape published his Selected Poems in 2002 and Black Moon in 2007.

In this, Matthew Sweeney's eighth full-length collection, the disarming fabulist and mythmaker steps out on his own into fresh territory. These are poems from a mapless journey through the backwaters of Europe and the New World - imbued, as always, with the strange, unerring logic of dream, but carrying now a new, fugitive, lyrical note. The sanctuary of the title is fragile and hard-won, and the complexities of the emotional life are written into the architecture of the physical, making for a poetry that is both vulnerable and disturbing. 
 
Celebrated for his ability to blend the simple terror of folklore with the more sophisticated anxieties of Kafka and the contemporary, Sweeney moves through this book like a revenant - past monkeys dressed as doormen, through ice-hotels and showers of human hair, towards a scaffold or a lover. Obliquely sinister and wryly engaging, full of fright and grim hilarity, these are rootless poems - unsettled and unsettling, and very far from home. 
 
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

A Smell Of Fish

The new book from the popular Irish poet, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry.

Sweeney's poems are reflective, funny, supremely inventive and impeccably written. This is contemporary poetry at its very best

Matthew Sweeney is a unique force for good in British poetry. The work is one large metaphor, a parable for the human condition... He is one of our finest poets of the unconscious; of darkness brought to life and madly, glintingly, against all expectation, shared

The poems are rich with situation and character, embryos of narrative, pulsing with implicit life... Sweeney has full command of the devices of poetry: sound, image, rhythm adn form, and a sly sense of humour

Sweeney's poems are like shards of mirror. As you bend to look more closely, they cut. His version from Dante's Inferno , a passage which deals with the damned locked in ice on the floor of Hell, is chilling and possesses a near -demonic energy. It seems that for Sweeney, as for Douglas Dunn, a long poem releases new force in the poet

Matthew Sweeney was born in Donegal. Apart from his poetry, he has written children's fiction and edited three anthologies, Beyond Bedlam (with Ken Smith), Emergency Kit (with Jo Shapcott) and the New Faber Book of Children's Verse. Cape published his Selected Poems in 2002, and Sanctuary in 2004.

The poems in A Smell of Fish connect and radiate like the spokes of a wheel: haiku, sestinas, poems beginning with a line by somebody else or sparked off by foreign travel, a version of Dante, a sea sequence set on the Suffolk coast, and - long overdue - Matthew Sweeney's own version of the old Irish poem where his namesake is turned into a bird. 
 
In this, his seventh collection, we are back in a world where all explanations are withheld. 'If Beckett and Kafka come to mind', as Sean O'Brien wrote in his essay on Sweeney in The Deregulated Muse, 'they are not simply influences but kindred imaginations'. So we encounter a valley mysteriously filling with the smell of fish, second-world-war planes reappearing over London, a secret attic mural of a naked ex-lover, a cosmonaut abandoned on the moon, and a subterranean tunnel that runs the length of Ireland. 
 
Whatever the subject, we are in the confident hands of one of the most imaginatively gifted poets now writing.

Matthew Sweeney

Matthew Sweeney is a unique force for good in British poetry. The work is one large metaphor: a parable for the human condition... He is one of our finest poets of the unconscious; of darkness brought to light adn madly, glintingly, against all expectation, shared

Sweeney's imagination is fascinated by all the ways we say no to experience, and how those denials build an enigmatic and above all deeply personal architecture around us

His gift is to venture into unexpected territory... luminous stories springing from a rare and dark imagination

Negotiating the borders and hinterlands of Central and Eastern Europe - with occasional coracle trips or forays to Antarctica for a round of golf - the homesick flaneur surveys the surrounding devastation with the same mixture of fascination and alarm he feels when he discovers the sweat-mark on his T-shirt makes a perfect map of Ireland. All around, he sees natural and man-made catastrophe: the ruins and remnants of war peopled by kidnappers and assassins, feral dogs, death squads, the dispossessed and deracinated. 
 
These poems are parables of threat, parties for the end of the world; they speak eloquently of damage, displacement and the resulting swell of terror: 
 
'I looked back at the door 
heard the lock click, then beyond 
another lock, then another.'

Matthew Sweeney

Praise for Black Moon

Matthew Sweeney is a unique force for good in British poetry. The work is one large metaphor: a parable for the human condition... He is one of our finest poets of the unconscious; of darkness brought to light adn m ...

Here are the small and great truths of the imagination that bursts forth out of our daily lives. Sweeney's poems are reflective, funny, supremely inventive and impeccably written. This is contemporary poetry at its ...

Sweeney's imagination is fascinated by all the ways we say no to experience, and how those denials build an enigmatic and above all deeply personal architecture around us

Matthew Sweeney is a unique force for good in British poetry. The work is one large metaphor: a parable for the human condition... He is one of our finest poets of the unconscious; of darkness brought to light adn m ...

Here are the small and great truths of the imagination that bursts forth out of our daily lives. Sweeney's poems are reflective, funny, supremely inventive and impeccably written. This is contemporary poetry at its ...

Sweeney's imagination is fascinated by all the ways we say no to experience, and how those denials build an enigmatic and above all deeply personal architecture around us

Matthew Sweeney is a unique force for good in British poetry. The work is one large metaphor: a parable for the human condition... He is one of our finest poets of the unconscious; of darkness brought to light adn m ...

Here are the small and great truths of the imagination that bursts forth out of our daily lives. Sweeney's poems are reflective, funny, supremely inventive and impeccably written. This is contemporary poetry at its ...

Sweeney's imagination is fascinated by all the ways we say no to experience, and how those denials build an enigmatic and above all deeply personal architecture around us

Books by Matthew Sweeney

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