Matthew Sweeney

Negotiating the borders and hinterlands 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 the sweat-mark on his T-shirt makes a perfect map of Ireland. All around, he sees natural and man-made catastrophe: 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: 'I looked back at the door heard the lock click, then beyondanother lock, then another.'

age-range 10+ 'The day after I moved to the city I saw the fox. He was wrapped round the neck of a man, his red brush of a tail hanging down one side, his little head with its bright eyes on the other side. And the eyes were watching me - he was a living scarf!' Gerard is new to the city and new to his school. He is not getting on well at school and spends much time on his bike exploring his new neighbourhood. By chance he comes across a homeless man - and his live, pet fox. Gradually the man, boy and fox strike up a friendship, and Gerard finds he has much to learn from the man on the street. A touching, moving story about a boy learning more about the world - and growing up.

Shadow of the Owl is Matthew Sweeney's final collection, bringing together the poems he wrote during a year of debilitating illness. He died from Motor Neuron Disease in 2018 shortly after publishing My Life as a Painter, written before he became ill, but – like all his previous collections – preparation for this final work. In a sequence of dark fables, a hapless figure is hounded by a procession of invisible enemies who want him dead. These jokers – kidnappers, assassins, liars all – have many methods at their disposal, from crucifixion or hanging to bombing or mauling by crocodile… A menacing owl comes to the garden each night for twelve nights, but refuses to deliver its devastating news. All of Sweeney’s verve and spiky humour are present in these last poems, following, as always, the unnerving logic of dreams. But the dream has become a nightmare, and the catastrophe, impending in all the earlier collections, has now come to pass. The man on the run needs to reach new heights of ingenuity, if he is to escape, repeatedly, the most horrible of deaths. The poet is writing for his life. For more than forty years Matthew Sweeney sought to capture, in poetry, the life of a body menaced and condemned to wander in a terrifying place – but a body fully alive to the sensuous pleasures of the world, and the vulnerability of exposure to its loss. His final poems are imbued with a lyrical beauty and great sadness at leaving that world just as the spirit was burning as brightly as ever.

Matthew Sweeney wrote this set of 50 prose poems in response to Baudelaire's posthumously published collection of prose poems (or petits poemes en prose, as he called them). Modelling his pieces as closely as possible on Baudelaire's, Sweeney has produced an evocative autobiographical snapshot of his life in Paris.

Matthew Sweeney's palette in My Life as a Painter - his twelfth collection - features a wild mix of birds and animals: lizards, snakes, rats, camels, donkeys, feral cats, dogs and owls. One dog transmits telepathic requests for the food he wants, and there's a parrot who speaks as ambassador for the bird world. Sweeney's canvas here is the transhuman: where boundaries between human and non-human can't be fixed, dreams turn into torments, secrets stay hidden, strange communiques remain unclear, and the natural weirdness of his native Donegal verges on the surreal. There are poems ostensibly about art, artists and filmmaking which are as much portraits of the poet and the difficulties of writing poetry. Other poems offer oblique perspectives on religion, warfare, migration and displacement; or go off at a tangent to explore the imaginative possibilities of everything from Michigan's Mullett Lake and the geysers of Iceland to rope-ladders, tin-mines, a giant blue cabbage and an old thrown-out Christmas tree.

Matthew Sweeney's eleventh collection of poems is haunted by mortality, by other worlds and far-flung places, by visitations and violent events like the Spanish Inquisition. The poems are imaginative riffs featuring troubling companions and troublesome thoughts: ghosts and spirits, anger and guilt, crows and horses, a runaway calf and a footballing elephant. And yet amid the outlandish adventures and macabre musings in Inquisition Lane, other notes are also sounded: the poems can be lyrical as well as exuberant, saddened as well as extravagant. Dear friends are remembered. Faith is questioned. The Catholic Church is interrogated. German monks zoom by on Harley-Davidsons and chocolate is mined by French monks beneath the Madeleine in Paris.

Matthew Sweeney's tenth collection of poems is as sinister as its dark forebears, but the notes he hits in "Horse Music" are lyrical and touching as well as disturbing and disquieting. Confronting him in these imaginative riffs are not just the perplexing animals and folklorish crows familiar from his earlier books, but also magical horses, ghosts, dwarfs and gnomes. Central to the book are a group of Berlin poems - introducing us to, among things, the birds of Chamissoplatz who warn of coming ecological disaster, or the horses who swim across the Wannsee to pay homage to Heinrich von Kleist in his grave. Many poems in the book range freely across the borders of realism into an alternative realism, while others stay within what Elizabeth Bishop called 'the surrealism of everyday life' - such as a tale about Romanian gypsies removing bit by bit an abandoned car. "Horse Music" is not only Matthew Sweeney's most adventurous book to date, it is also his most varied, including not only outlandish adventures and macabre musings, but also moving responses to family deaths - balanced by a poem to a newborn, picturing the strange new world that will unfold for her. That strange world unfolds for us too in the eerie poems of Horse Music. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

A series of murders targets the nation's best known poets. Remarkably, they are being murdered in a way that reflects the style of their poems. Victor Priest is given the task of finding the murderer but when a car bomb is discovered in his car, by the eccentric and hilarious young couple turned detectives, a desperate confrontation takes place

A comprehensive guide to writing poetryWrite Poetry - and Get it Published is a user-friendly and comprehensive guide written by two well-published poets that will prove indispensible if you're seeking creative guidance, inspiration and practical advice. Covering everything from mood, style and tone to poetry on the internet, this fully updated edition will help you find your voice. Containing straightforward advice and the very latest on prizes, festivals and performance poetry, this book will enable an aspiring or seasoned poet alike to gain the confidence and necessary knowledge to write and publish compelling poetry.Write Poetry and Get it Published includes:Chapter 1: What does it take to be a poet?Chapter 2: Bump-starting the poemChapter 3: A challenge to the reader: groundwork exercisesChapter 4: Getting started: working arrangementsChapter 5: I gotta use words when I talk to youChapter 6: Letters, alphabets and listsChapter 7: VisualizingChapter 8: Drafting and revisionChapter 9: Using modelsChapter 10: The co-operative approachChapter 11: Subject matterChapter 12: Context, mood and toneChapter 13: Writing in different modesChapter 14: StyleChapter 15: Getting the rhymes to chose youChapter 16: It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swingChapter 17: TranslationChapter 18: Writing for childrenChapter 19: Getting publishedChapter 20: ipoems and cyber verseChapter 21: Reading aloudChapter 22: Poetry prizes and festivalsChapter 23: ars poeticaABOUT THE SERIESThe Teach Yourself Creative Writing series helps aspiring authors tell their story. Covering a range of genres from science fiction and romantic novels, to illustrated children's books and comedy, this series is packed with advice, exercises and tips for unlocking creativity and improving your writing. And because we know how daunting the blank page can be, we set up the Just Write online community at tyjustwrite, for budding authors and successful writers to connect and share.

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.A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Includes poems that 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 - the author's own version of the old Irish poem where his namesake is turned into a bird.