fried chicken with garlic, grilled lambs’ kidneys,
and drunk a bottle of Ramon Bilbao Rioja Crianza.
No one had tortured me for my lack of faith
in the gilted Madonna or the cross-carrying Christ.
No one was going to throw me in the river,
minus my thumbs, fingers or testicles.
I’d even watched Barcelona win in silence,
they were as popular as Protestants in Seville.
Inquisition Lane was dim but not dark –
the moon hung low above it, and swallows
darted about, over my long-haired head.
I heard the faint sound of flamenco singing.
I reached the river, and saw a boat there –
without thinking I jumped in. The oars
moved through the water by themselves
and brought me to Inquisition Castle
which had reassembled itself on the riverbank
and welcomed me into its dark basement.
Related Reviews
'In Sweeney's poems, things happen for no reason, it seems, other than to tantalise and entertain. But the cumulative effect is to force us to consider imagination itself: its quirks, its curious dissatisfaction with the everyday...this is a wonderful collection, madcap, laconic, and provocative too' - Bill Greenwell, Independent [on Horse Music].
‘A poet of obsession and ritual...often elusive or mysterious...enlivened with his saturnine, uncomfortably insistent humour...Ambitious and troubling, linking Ireland to the Black Sea and madness to history, grim as death and very funny.' – Sean O’Brien, Guardian [on Black Moon]
‘Haunting fables of entrapment or imprisonment, of troubled sleep, of persecution and loneliness treated with Kafkaesque attention to detail.’ – Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times
‘With its landscapes of desolate isolations, his is often an evocatively noirish world of contemporary angst… The persona of the poems is a troubled, self-aware consciousness taking in but never quite making sense of a contemporary world of fragments, a consciousness stretched and strained, but untouched by self-indulgence, self-pity or self-regard.’ – Eamon Grennan, Irish Times
