A Smell of Fish
Matthew Sweeney
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.
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About Matthew Sweeney
Reviews for A Smell of Fish
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