Book description
Representing the best of ten books and twenty years' work, Matthew
Sweeney's Selected Poems is a magical mystery tour into his strange,
unsettling world. Readers familiar with his poetry will be used to being
led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister
twists, taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are
coming to the work for the first time may feel a measure of alarm and
disquiet at the way the poems shift - almost without your noticing -
from a fireside chat to a tale of terror, from the commonplace to the
hallucinatory, from the surprisingly real to the really surprising.
These are the secret, spiky narratives from the arch story-teller, the
mixer of hilarity and menace, the past-master of fractured realism. The
world would be a poorer place without these oblique but oddly lucid
poems from Matthew Sweeney's haunted imagination. Matthew Sweeney was
born in Donegal and has lived in London for many years. 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.
