Black Moon

by Matthew Sweeney

Negotiating the borders 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 that the sweat mark on his T-shirt makes a perfect map of Ireland. All around, he sees natural and man-made 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.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published July 19, 2007

About the author

Matthew Sweeney was an Irish poet.

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

Reviews

[Vanessa · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this was a decent collection of poetry, but nothing particularly stood out for me in terms of language or theme. Sweeney's poems are straight talking, bereft of metaphors or lyrical wordplay, and can be quite dark at times. A quick collection but one I'd potentially like to revisit in the future.

[Ramzzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Matthew Sweeney is a poet of dark imagination. He could have conquered it all, if not for the middle part which imagination and innovation didn’t coalesce, and hence, many poems felt prosaic and flat in spite its story-telling ambitions. Regardless, Black Moon offers hope for Ireland’s poetry. The legacy of Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, and Heaney are too big, that their contemporary poets can’t pull punches as cosmic as theirs. Sweeney is still cited under, and that’s enough for Ireland’s literature, and for us readers seeking the new.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some dark, surreal, apocalyptic poems here. Haunting, funny, sometimes genuinely upsetting. Great stuff.