King of a Rainy Country by Matthew Sweeney Chatto & Windus  Bondo is also the

 Bondo is also the voice which echoes the role of th Welsh bard as remembrancer

with a delicacy of hand and eye that again and again presents us with domestic perceptions that have what Melville called “the shock of recognition”

Virginia suggests – as she works as a lock-keeper's assistant – that they become almost addicted to the peace and beauty of their place of work

The length of each book

a list of flowers is not really a list of flowers

King of a Rainy Country by Matthew Sweeney Chatto & Windus  Bondo is also theMatthew Sweeney wrote this set of 50 prose poems in response to Baudelaire's posthumously published collection of prose poems (or petits pomes en prose, as he called them). Modelling his pieces as closely as possible on Baudelaire's, Sweeney has produced a sequence that is wide ranging in both subject and mood there are stories, parables, meditations, diatribes that are, by turns, quirky, reflective, ascerbic and funny the overall effect of which is