"Using a wide variety of styles and tones, the strands of poems in A Smell of Fishradiate like the spores of a wheel- haiku, sestinas, poems about foreign travel, verses beginning with a line by someone else, a sea sequence set in Alderburgh and - long overdue - Matthew Sweeney's own version of the Old Irish poem 'Sweeney'. In this, his seventh collection, we are back in a world of mysterious clarity, of an alternative realism that is as playful as it is unsettling- we are shown a blue dyed chihuahua, a recipe for roadkill, second-world-war fighter planes appearing over London, a fatally constipated bull elephant, and a subterranean tunnel that runs the length of Ireland. Whatever the subject, we are in the confident hands of one of the most imaginatively gifted poets now writing."