Book description
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 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.
