{"title":"Aidan Matthews","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"charlie-chaplin-s-wishbone-book-aidan-matthews-9781843516415","title":"Charlie Chaplin's Wishbone","description":"These twelve masterful short stories are by one of Ireland’s leading practitioners of the art (previous collections include Adventures in a Bathyscope, 1998, and Lipstick on the Host, 1992). Mathews is a writer worthy of Joyce, whose condensed language conveys learning, sophistication, true feeling and poignancy. The range of subject matter is conveyed in the story titles: ‘Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone’, ‘Access’, ‘Barber-Surgeons’, ‘Waking a Jew’, ‘Cuba’, ‘The Seven Affidavits of Saint-Artaud’, ‘A Woman from Walkinstown’, ‘In the Form of Fiction’, ‘The Logos of the Zoo’, and ‘Information for the User’. The stories are set in Ireland and principally in Dublin of the 1960s. Characterisation is rich and the dialogue lively and expressive, while the understated dramas and emotions of the tales themselves subtly washing over the reader. The verbal flair of Aidan Mathews is second to none, and the seriousness and the gravity of his contemplations a welcome counterweight to our desiccated, Anglo-American digital culture. This gathering marks a welcome return of a major voice in Irish literature, unpublished since the 1990s.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49512190279953,"sku":"GOR009196897","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1843516411.jpg?v=1778147922"},{"product_id":"strictly-no-poetry-book-aidan-matthews-9781843517443","title":"Strictly No Poetry","description":"In these forty-eight remarkable individual poems and sequences, Mathews lays out his witness to the travails and joys of youth and age, to the passing political parade and the intimacies of nature, to the exigencies of parenthood, of frailty and endurance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49609276784913,"sku":"GOR012139043","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49615847227665,"sku":"GOR011977535","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1843517442.jpg?v=1750898932"},{"product_id":"communion-book-aidan-matthews-9781854596895","title":"Communion","description":"First play by established Irish poet and novelist - premiered at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin Set in a bedroom in well-to-do Dublin, Communion is about two brothers in their early thirties. Jordan, a trainee doctor, is bedbound and dying of a tumour; Marcus, brilliant and charismatic, has been a psychiatric patient. Around the deathbed gather their long-suffering mother, an ebullient neighbour, Marcus's girlfriend, and their healthily sceptical priest. But gloom is repeatedly dispelled by the liveliness of the dialogue and characters and by the buoyant humour on display - particularly at the expense of the Catholic Church. Communion was premiered in the Peacock at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on 25 April 2002. One of Mathews' collections of poems, According to the Small Hours, is described as 'exploring the connections between the sacred and the profane, the sublime and the everyday' - which could also be said of Communion...","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49651175555345,"sku":"GOR002377676","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1854596896.jpg?v=1751249295"},{"product_id":"pure-filth-book-aidan-matthews-9781843518754","title":"Pure Filth","description":"Pure Filth, Aidan Mathews’ fifth volume of poetry, follows upon Windfalls (Dolmen, 1977), Minding Ruth (Gallery, 1983), According to the Small Hours (Cape, 1998) and Strictly No Poetry (Lilliput, 2017). At its heart, the collection is about reflections on a career and sustained loves for people, God and art, with themes threaded throughout such as the pandemic, suburban Dublin, Irish landscape and history and the Holocaust.  His critic and biographer David Wheatley says:  ‘It is no exaggeration to say that Mathews does not have themes so much as obsessions. If his Catholic faith provides the ground base for all his work, sexuality, mental illness and the Holocaust recur in poem after poem, stitching together the quotidian and the extreme … Synthesizing the sexual, the sacred, and the secular, Mathews’ poetry is a testament of great personal power, answerable to the cloister and the locked ward, the social lepers and the captains of the ship of state.’ (Irish Poetry, Wake Forest 2017)","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49750229483793,"sku":"NGR9781843518754","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49885405675793,"sku":"GOR013439839","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52099268182289,"sku":"GOR014489486","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1843518759.jpg?v=1750929982"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/author-books-by-aidan-matthews.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}