Horse Music

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. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

Matthew Sweeney was born in Co. Donegal, and lived in London from 1973 until the late 90s. After living in Berlin and Timisoara for some years, he returned to Ireland and now lives in Cork, where he is writer in residence at University College Cork. His books include two collections from Secker and five books from Cape: The Bridal Suite (1997), A Smell of Fish (2000), Selected Poems (2002), Sanctuary (2004), Black Moon (2007). Black Moon (Cape, 2007) was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His latest books are The Night Post (Salt, 2010), a selection from earlier collections; Horse Music (Bloodaxe Books, 2013), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; and Inquisition Lane (Bloodaxe Books, 2015). He is a member of Aosdána.