Amazon.com description: Product Description: A Poetry Book Society Recommendation

With The Lame Waltzer the reader enters a teasing, precarious world in which whimsy has a sharp edge, irony lurks beneath the plainest surface and the intimate, confiding narrators are not always to be trusted. In these poems rural Ireland is haunted as much by material greed as by the ghosts of history, London and suburban England hold their own different kinds of menace, and imagined lives are lived as concretely in the here-and-now as in the imminent, disturbingly familiar, future
Of his previous book, A Round House, the critics wrote:"Matthew Sweeney is a young poet from Donegal. A Round House is his second collection. It is superb"- Robert Welch, Yorkshire Post
"He is more a poet of the world than the self, and the world as seen through a pair of inventive, sometimes tricksy eyes" The Times Literary Supplement
"A Round House is a story of O, a hymn to the circle. But the letter omega is also the numeral zero: an atmosphere of menace fumigates the book . . . .A round of applause is in order"- Aidan Carl Matthews, Irish Times
"Sweeney shows himself at home in the shadowland between waking and nightmare .... Sweeneyland borders on the menace of Pinterland" Irish Press
"If I lose this copy I shall buy another" - In Dublin
Matthew Sweeney was born in Donegal in 1952. He has lived in Germany, where he studied at the University of Freiburg, In 1984 he won the New Statesman's Prudence Farmer Award.