Horse Music

By Matthew Sweeney

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2014
• ISBN: 9781780370668

Matthew Sweeney

Matthew Sweeney is a freelance journalist who has worked for both the New York Times and the New York Post. He lives in Brooklyn.

Book preview

MATTHEW SWEENEY

HORSE MUSIC

Poetry Book Society Recommendation

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.

COVER PAINTING

The Singing Horseman (1949) by Jack B. Yeats

OIL ON CANVAS. 61.4 X 92

CM

PHOTO © NATIONAL GALLERY OF IRELAND

© DACS, LONDON, 2013

Matthew Sweeney

HORSE MUSIC

for Mary

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to the editors of the following publications where some of these poems first appeared: Alhambra Poetry Calendar, The Best British Poetry 2011 (Salt Publishing, 2011), BigCityLit, Blackbox Manifold, The Bow Wow Shop, Cork Literary Review, The Dark Horse, The Echo Room, Free Verse, The Guardian, Guernica, The Irish Times, London Magazine, London Review of Books, Magma, The New Yorker, The North, The Poetry Archive, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Prairie Schooner, The Rialto, The Shop, Southword, The Spectator, The Stinging Fly, The Ulster Tatler, Upstairs at Duroc, The Warwick Review, Wasafiri. and The Wolf.

‘A History of Glassblowing’ was awarded joint second prize in the 2010 National Poetry Competition.

‘Fans’ appeared in the bilingual selection, Rosa Milch, published by Berlin Verlag in 2008.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

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