Review: A Picnic on Ice

Originally published in The Danforth Review, 2004.

A butcher pulls himself from the grave every night, habitually serving the village he knows. A hanged man describes the moments after the event, not the moments leading up to it. A man separated from his wife becomes a crow and sits on a nearby tree watching her.

The poems of Ireland's Matthew Sweeney are not all morbid, but they are all highly original, and Signal Editions introduces a selection representing twenty-years and ten books in A...