Representing the best of 10 books and 20 years' work, this collection is a magical tour into Sweeney's strange, unsettling world. Readers familiar with his poetry will be used to being led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister twists, and taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are arriving for the first time may feel a measure of alarm and disquiet at the way the poems shift from a fireside chat to a tale of terror, from the commonplace to the hallucinatory, from the surprisingly real to the really surprising. These are the most secret, spiky narratives from the arch storyteller, the mixer of hilarity and menace, the master of fractured realism. The world would be a poorer place without these oblique but oddly lucid poems from Matthew Sweeney's haunted imagination.
