Books by Matthew Sweeney

Twelfth collection by leading Irish poet features poems ostensibly about art, artists and filmmaking which are as much portraits of the poet and the difficulties of writing poetry, plus surreal poems on birds and animals.

A story of a friendship between a young boy, an old man and his pet fox.

Matthew Sweeney is one of our best-known poets - with a high profile in both Britain and Ireland - and moves from Cape to Bloodaxe with this collection. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

The cream of Britain's poets are getting murdered. Victor Priest takes on two assistants to help investigate. In a hilarious and dramatic denoument the criminal is discovered. Priest hires two assistants to help track the criminal. Despite their unconventional and hilarious behaviour they bring the case to a dramatic conclusion.

YOUR COMPLETE GUIDE TO UNDERSTANDING AND WRITING POETRY. Write Poetry - and Get it Published is a new edition of a long-standing and popular guide which offers you plenty of advice and ideas for inspiration as well as practical support for all aspects of the poetry writing and publication process.

Negotiating the borders and hinterlands of Central and Eastern Europe - with occasional coracle trips or forays to Antarctica for a round of golf - the homesick flaneur surveys the surrounding devastation with the same mixture of fascination and alarm he feels when he discovers the sweat-mark on his T-shirt makes a perfect map of Ireland.

Includes poems that connect and radiate like the spokes of a wheel: haiku, sestinas, poems beginning with a line by somebody else or sparked off by foreign travel, a version of Dante, a sea sequence set on the Suffolk coast, and - long overdue - the author's own version of the old Irish poem where his namesake is turned into a bird.

Obliquely sinister and wryly engaging, full of fright and grim hilarity, these are rootless poems - unsettled and unsettling, and very far from home. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.