Horse Music

Matthew Sweeney

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781852249670
• eBook ISBN:
  9781780370668
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Epigraph
• The Emperor’s Dwarves
• The Vintner’s Boat
• The Village of Scarecrows
• Confiscated
• Ghost
• The Photos on the Wall
• The Tunnel
• The Poison Dwarfs
• The Warning
• A Song about a Crow
• The Alchemist
• A History of Glassblowing
• The Blue Hammock
• Fish and Chips
• Horse Music
• Communiqué
• Haiku for My Father
• In the Garden
• The Glass Chess Set
• Lunch in Alfama
• Sunday Morning
• Snow, Ice
• Revenant
• The Bomb
• The Rising
• The Suckling Pig
• Sausages
• Pan on the Pink Bridge
• Ballad of the Horse and Wine
• The White Peacock at Schloß Eggenberg
• The Twit
• Dr Quincy’s Pleasure Emporium
• Other Worlds
• How I Was Made 20 Years Younger
• The Sleepwalker
• Nil
• To Ash Again
• Inside
• The Key of Blue
• Domestic
• Sleeping
• The Glass Eye
• The Sick Cow
• The Lost Gold Medal
• The Naming of Horses
• Burning
• Waiting
• The Lake
• The Last Day of Summer
• On the Way to Potsdam
• The Fall
• Heckewald
• A Pig in God’s Ear
• That Meal
• A Princess
• Chop Suey
• Doodle Doo
• Little Flower
• Autumn
• The Deserter
• His Crows
• Saxophone Man
• The Slow Story of No
• Stone
• The Piper’s Cave
• Fans
• The Birds of Chamissoplatz
• Eternity Strand
• Booty
• The Yellow Golf Ball on the Lawn
• About the Author
• Copyright