A Smell Of Fish
  • Published: 3 March 2000
  • ISBN: 9780224060677
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $19.99

A Smell Of Fish

Formats & editions
EBook
15 Mar 2011
Paperback
3 Mar 2000
Buy from…
Amazon Booktopia Dymocks QBD Readings Find local retailers Find local retailers Abbeys Angus & Robertson Boomerang Collins Fishpond Gleebooks Harry Hartog Kinokuniya Robinsons The Nile Your Bookstore

The new book from the popular Irish poet, shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Poetry.

The poems in A Smell of Fish connect and radiate like the spokes of a wheel: haiku, sestinas, poems beginning with a line by somebody else or sparked off by foreign travel, a version of Dante, a sea sequence set on the Suffolk coast, and - long overdue - Matthew Sweeney's own version of the old Irish poem where his namesake is turned into a bird.

In this, his seventh collection, we are back in a world where all explanations are withheld. 'If Beckett and Kafka come to mind', as Sean O'Brien wrote in his essay on Sweeney in The Deregulated Muse, 'they are not simply influences but kindred imaginations'. So we encounter a valley mysteriously filling with the smell of fish, second-world-war planes reappearing over London, a secret attic mural of a naked ex-lover, a cosmonaut abandoned on the moon, and a subterranean tunnel that runs the length of Ireland.

Whatever the subject, we are in the confident hands of one of the most imaginatively gifted poets now writing.
  • Published: 3 March 2000
  • ISBN: 9780224060677
  • Imprint: Jonathan Cape
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 80
  • RRP: $19.99
Categories:
Share…

About the author

Matthew Sweeney

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, and Sanctuary in 2004. A new collection, Black Moon, will be published in July 2007.

Also by Matthew Sweeney

Black Moon
Sanctuary
See all

Praise for A Smell Of Fish

Sweeney's poems are reflective, funny, supremely inventive and impeccably written. This is contemporary poetry at its very best

Charles Simic

Matthew Sweeney is a unique force for good in British poetry. The work is one large metaphor, a parable for the human condition... He is one of our finest poets of the unconscious; of darkness brought to life and madly, glintingly, against all expectation, shared

Ruth Padel, Independent

The poems are rich with situation and character, embryos of narrative, pulsing with implicit life... Sweeney has full command of the devices of poetry: sound, image, rhythm adn form, and a sly sense of humour

Financial Times, Ruth Fainlight

Darkly comic

Guardian

Sweeney's poems are like shards of mirror. As you bend to look more closely, they cut. His version from Dante's Inferno , a passage which deals with the damned locked in ice on the floor of Hell, is chilling and possesses a near -demonic energy. It seems that for Sweeney, as for Douglas Dunn, a long poem releases new force in the poet

Observer