- Published: 3 March 2000
- ISBN: 9780224060677
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 80
- RRP: $22.99
A Smell Of Fish
- Published: 3 March 2000
- ISBN: 9780224060677
- Imprint: Jonathan Cape
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 80
- RRP: $22.99
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