According to the Small Hours
  • Published: 31 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448129959
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128

According to the Small Hours

Formats & editions
EBook
31 Dec 2011
Paperback
15 Oct 1998
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'Abundant, enthralling, often heartbreaking, According to the Small Hours makes its indelible mark as Aidan Mathews' triumphant return to poetry' - Michael Longley

In this, his first collection of poems in fifteen years, Aidan Mathews brings together the sacred and the profane, playful and profound, the iconic and the everyday - illuminating the variousness and commonality of human experience. These poems wear their erudition lightly: dazzling us with their fresh observations, the strangely intimate details ('mice among the breadcrumbs of the Last Supper') and a fluid, metaphysical wit that can link a saint's matyrdom to a Sunday roast.

Mercurial, passionate and always surprising, According to the Small Hours is a triumphant return to the form.
  • Published: 31 December 2011
  • ISBN: 9781448129959
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 128
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About the author

Aidan Mathews

Born in 1956 and brought up in Dublin, Aidan Mathews won prestigious poetry prizes when he was scarcely out of his teens and had his first collection published at twenty-one with a second six years later in 1983. His third collection, According to the Small Hours, was published in 1998.

Praise for According to the Small Hours

A unique talent

John Banville

Dizzy and yet deliberate, devout but always streetwise, Aidan Mathews moves and startles us. These very clever, complicated poems challenge their own disenchantment and somehow maintain a religious sense of life

Michael Longley

The commingling here of the sacred and the secular lexicons produces a powerful medicine, a haunted music. Mathews bides his time well between incarnations. These are poems worth waiting for, worth remembering, worth learning by heart

Thomas Lynch

The most talented poet of his generation in Ireland

Sebastian Barry