Book description
In this, his first collection of poems in fifteen years, Aidan
Mathews brings together the sacred and the profane, playful and
profound, the iconic and the everyday - illuminating the variousness
and commonality of human experience. These poems wear their erudition
lightly: dazzling us with their fresh observations, the strangely
intimate details ('mice among the breadcrumbs of the Last Supper') and
a fluid, metaphysical wit that can link a saint's matyrdom to a Sunday
roast.
Mercurial, passionate and always surprising, According to the
Small Hours is a triumphant return to the form.
Aidan Mathew's first book, published when he was twenty-one, was the
colection of poems
Windfalls
. he had already won the Irish Times Award and the Patrick Kavanagh
Award, and he went on to publish a second collection six years later, in
1983. Since then he has concentrated on drama and fiction - his first
book of stories,
Adventures in a Bathyscope
, being shortlisted for the first GPA Award. The Italian edition of his
Lipstick on the Host
won the a Cavour Prize for Foreign Fiction.
