# A Smell Of Fish

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- Authors: [Matthew Sweeney](https://www.bookquiver.com/matthew-sweeney)
- Language: en_GB
- Published: 2000-03-02

## Description

The poems in A Smell of Fish 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 - Matthew Sweeney's own version of the old Irish poem where his namesake is turned into a bird. In this, his seventh collection, we are back in a world where all explanations are withheld. 'If Beckett and Kafka come to mind', as Sean O'Brien wrote in his essay on Sweeney in The Deregulated Muse , 'they are not simply influences but kindred imaginations'. So we encounter a valley mysteriously filling with the smell of fish, second-world-war planes reappearing over London, a secret attic mural of a naked ex-lover, a cosmonaut abandoned on the moon, and a subterranean tunnel that runs the length of Ireland. Whatever the subject, we are in the confident hands of one of the most imaginatively gifted poets now writing.

## Editions

### A Smell Of Fish

- Publisher: Jonathan Cape
- ISBN: 978-02-2406-067-7
- Pages: 80
- Published: 2000-03-02
- Language: en_GB