Book description
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.
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.
