Inquisition Lane

Matthew Sweeney’s eleventh collection of poems is haunted by mortality, by other worlds and far-flung places, by visitations and violent events like the Spanish Inquisition. The poems are imaginative riffs featuring troubling companions and troublesome thoughts: ghosts and spirits, anger and guilt, crows and horses, a runaway calf and a footballing elephant. And yet amid the outlandish adventures and macabre musings in Inquisition Lane, other notes are also sounded: the poems can be lyrical as well as exuberant, saddened as well as extravagant. Dear friends are remembered. Faith is questioned. The Catholic Church is interrogated. German monks zoom by on Harley-Davidsons and chocolate is mined by French monks beneath the Madeleine in Paris.