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Pure Filth

By: Aidan Mathews

Publication Date: 2 November 2023

15.00

Pure Filth, Aidan Mathews’ extraordinary fifth collection of poems, forged during a pandemic, finds clarity through the cheerfulness of paradox. In sickness and in health, for better and for worse, these sixty-seven verses invite us to cherish imperfection as our only pure and possible ecosystem. As finite creatures, he holds, we must choose our infinitives with care. Making do is always the aim in this world, but muddling through is often the outcome.

Critic and biographer David Wheatley says, ‘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.’

Fellow novelist and poet Adam Thorpe writes, ‘Aidan Mathews has long been a favourite of mine, whether in poetry or prose. Switching from Dryden to an An Lar bus-ticket, from grafitti in Pompeii to “the wild cat lake of Galilee”, the poems are electric, febrile, startled by their own energy. Not for the faint-hearted.’

In their focus and singularity, Mathews’ poems are proof of a vision that reconciles the secular and the liturgical, history and happenstance, the cosmic and the familial, bringing delight and wonder to our ‘incorrigibly plural’ world.

‘Mathews’ great strength is in gleaning unvanquished beauty from the humblest thing, maybe the ugliest thing and perhaps the pure filth of it. A magnificent work.’ ANNE CUNNINGHAM, MEATH CHRONICLE

 

PRAISE FOR AIDAN MATHEWS
‘Aidan Mathews has the particular verbal gift and original way of seeing the world that this kind of writing requires. In less able hands such writing can become meretricious and tedious. But he is a master of the style.’ ÉILÍS NÍ DHUIBHNE

‘The Cristiano Ronaldo of linguistic stepovers.’ DERMOT BOLGER

‘The most talented poet of his generation in Ireland.’ SEBASTIAN BARRY

‘No poems I’ve read in the last few years have impressed me more than these.’ RICHARD MURPHY

‘Abundant, enthralling, often heart-breaking.’ MICHAEL LONGLEY

‘Mathews’ achievement … is to have wedded the liturgical and the secular, shifting the registers of the English language to pay proper respect to all its vast resources.’ CIARAN CARSON

Aidan Mathews speaks about his new collection of poetry Pure Filth with RTÉ Culture here

‘Read classics and trash in equal ratio. Copycat your mentors until they become tormentors’ – read a Q&A with Aidan Mathews in the Irish Times here

A SUNDAY INDEPENDENT BOOK OF THE YEAR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Aidan Mathews was born in Dublin in 1956 and attended UCD and Stanford University in the USA. He is an award-winning playwright, novelist and short-story writer, whose last collection, Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone and Other Stories, was published by the Lilliput Press in 2015. He was a radio drama producer with RTÉ for over thirty years until retiring in 2020.

Pure Filth follows upon Windfalls (1977), Minding Ruth (1983), According to the Small Hours (1998) and Strictly No Poetry (2018).

Quantity
ISBN
9781843518754
Weight 0.500 kg
Dimensions 234 × 156 mm
Format

Paperback w/ Flaps

Publication Date

2 November 2023

Extent

160pp

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