According to the Small Hours

Aidan Mathew's first book, published when he was twenty-one, was the colection of poems Windfalls. he had already won the Irish Times Award and the Patrick Kavanagh Award, and he went on to publish a second collection six years later, in 1983. Since then he has concentrated on drama and fiction - his first book of stories, Adventures in a Bathyscope, being shortlisted for the first GPA Award. The Italian edition of his Lipstick on the Host won the a Cavour Prize for Foreign Fiction.

"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