Representing the best of ten books and twenty years' work, Matthew Sweeney's Selected Poems is a magical mystery tour into the strange, unsettling world of this acclaimed Irish poet. Reader's familiar with his poetry will be accustomed to being led astray by his cordial, confiding wit, ambushed by his sinister twists, and taken in by his intimate, untrustworthy narrators. Those who are coming to his work for the first time may feel a measure of alarm and disquiet at the way the poems shift?almost without your noticing?from a fireplace chat to a tale of terror, from the commonplace to the hallucinatory, from the surprisingly real to the really surprising. In this, Sweeney's North American debut, we are in the hands of one of the most imaginatively gifted poets now writing.