According to the Small Hours - Softcover

"A unique talent" (John Banville)

"The commingling here of the sacred and the secular lexicons produces a powerful medicine, a haunted music. Mathews bides his time well between incarnations. These are poems worth waiting for, worth remembering, worth learning by heart" (Thomas Lynch)

"The most talented poet of his generation in Ireland" (Sebastian Barry)

"Dizzy and yet deliberate, devout but always streetwise, Aidan Mathews moves and startles us. These very clever, complicated poems challenge their own disenchantment and somehow maintain a religious sense of life" (Michael Longley)

In this, his first collection of poems in fifteen years, Aidan Mathews brings together the sacred and the profane, playful and profound, the iconic and the everyday - illuminating the variousness and commonality of human experience. These poems wear their erudition lightly: dazzling us with their fresh observations, the strangely intimate details ('mice among the breadcrumbs of the Last Supper') and a fluid, metaphysical wit that can link a saint's matyrdom to a Sunday roast.

Mercurial, passionate and always surprising, According to the Small Hours is a triumphant return to the form.