Selected Poems

by Matthew Sweeney

Representing the best of 10 books and 20 years' work, this collection is a magical tour into Sweeney's 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, and taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are arriving for the first time may feel a measure of alarm and disquiet at the way the poems shift 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 most secret, spiky narratives from the arch storyteller, the mixer of hilarity and menace, the master of fractured realism. The world would be a poorer place without these oblique but oddly lucid poems from Matthew Sweeney's haunted imagination.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Hardcover

First published March 21, 2002

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

[Owain Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I met Matthew Sweeney years ago when he came in to do a talk at my uni. He seemed like one of the good guys and I came away from his talk with new insights into the imaginative possibilities of poetry. He pointed out the similarities between poems and cinema, and how you can do a lot with very little. His poems are very subtle vignettes, spooky, uncanny, sometimes bleak but often darkly funny - there's always a little snigger of barbed laughter, the jag in the joke as he said in his talk. I can't really think of anyone I've read who writes like him, perhaps Charles Simic comes close but then I think he might have been an early influence on Sweeney. Felt weird when I found out he'd died. I only met him that once but it felt like a loss, like finding out a distant uncle you met a couple of times when you were young but were fond of nontheless has passed away.