A Smell of Fish (Cape poetry) Book

A Smell of Fish is Irish-born, London-berthed Sweeney's seventh volume of poetry and his 14th book in total. As such, the sense of a writer hitting a mid-season peak, fully in control of his talents and powers, is palpable. And the range of styles is impressive, too: by turns sombre, funny, detached, passionate, Sweeney is keen to play every octave on poetry's piano--and to experiment with voices not entirely his own.Sometimes, like in the city man's dream of freedom that is the Appointment, his whimsical nature imagery is reminiscent of W.B. Yeats; "so he jumped in and swam / and a red-tailed hawk / led him to the island / where among the silverbirch / he found a lantern". In other poems, like the wittily acerbic Roadkill, he sounds like Ted Hughes in a bit of a bad mood: "Scrape the cat off the road / take it home and fillet out the flesh / throw it in the marinade".The more experimental poems are always intriguing, if not always entirely successful. In the middle of the collection is a series of haikus, the best of which, like Hangover ("Look a drunk lying / in a canoe / being walked on / by a pair of skunks"), are oddly but tellingly comic. Immediately after them comes a chunk of very freely translated Dante: "what's your name?" / Fame is the last thing I want / Fuck off and don't annoy me further".A Smell of Fish ends with a suite of related poems, themed around the bleak surreal beauty of the English littoral at Thorpeness. These are the best poems in the book: sardonic, lyrical, strongly imagined. For Sweeney, Thorpeness is a place where waves "are apologetic on the shingle/after the excesses of the previous night", where the "white dome of Sizewell / is the bald head of a killer". Taken together the Thorpeness verses form a vivid and resonant conclusion to a coveted collection. --Sean ThomasRead More