"A Smell of Fish" by Matthew Sweeney (Cape Poetry, 2000)

Many people have said nice things about Sweeney's work, so I thought I'd better take a look. A short story writer looking at "Incident in Exeter Station" or a travel article writer looking at "A Day in Calcutta" might well wonder whether poets have too easy a time. I prefer him when he loosens his imagination a little; in "The Moths", for instance, or "Zeppelins". I think I'd prefer Carol Ann Duffy's version of "Guardian of the Women's Loo in Waterloo". A number of the pieces sound like tamer versions of the modern prose poems that people like Simic write.