Search results for ""author matthew sweeney""

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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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Emergency Kit is an anthology with many differences. It is, to begin with, a book which gives prominence to poems rather than to the poets who wrote them. It is truly international, bringing together poems not just from these islands but from many parts of the English-speaking world. It is the first book to identify a strain in the poetry of the last half-century which is characteristic of the 'strange times' we live in - an age when, as the editors note, scientific discovery itself has encouraged us to 'make free with the boundaries of realism'. It values imagination, surprise, vivid expression, the outlandish and the playful above ideology and sententiousness. It is, in short, living proof that poetry in the English language continues to thrive and to matter.

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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.

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