SWEENEY, Matthew

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Nationality: Irish. Born: County Donegal, 6 October 1952. Education: Gormanston College, County Meath, 1965–70; University College, Dublin, 1970–72; Polytechnic of North London, 1977–78, B.A. (honors) in English and German; University of Freiburg, West Germany, 1977–78. Family: Married Rosemary Barber in 1979; two children. Career: Writer-in-residence, Farnham College, Surrey, 1984, 1985; external advisor in creative writing, West Surrey College of Art and Design, Farnham, 1986–89; publicist and events assistant, Poetry Society, London, 1988–90; poet-in-residence, Hereford & Worcester, 1991; writer-in-residence, South Bank Centre, 1994–95. Awards: Prudence Farmer award, 1984; University of East Anglia writing fellowship, 1986; Cholmondeley award, 1987; Arts Council of Great Britain Bursary in creative writing, 1992. Address: 11 Dombey Street, London, WC1N 3PB, England.

Publications

Poetry

Without Shores. Leicester, Omens, 1978.

A Dream of Maps. Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1981.

A Round House. Dublin, Raven Arts Press, and London, Allison and Bus by, 1983.

The Lame Waltzer. Dublin, Raven Arts Press, and London, Allison and Busby, 1985.

Blue Shoes. London, Secker and Warburg, 1989.

Cacti. London, Secker and Warburg, 1992.

The Flying Spring Onion (for children). London, Faber, 1992.

The Blue Taps (for children). London, Prospero Poets, 1994.

Fatso in the Red Suit (for children). London, Faber, 1995.

The Bridal Suite (for children). London, Cape, 1997.

A Smell of Fish. London, Cape, 2000.

Other

The Chinese Dressing Gown (for children). Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1987.

The Snow Vulture (for children). London, Faber, 1992.

Writing Poetry: And Getting Published. London, Hodder Headline, and Lincolnwood, Illinois, NTC Publishing Group, 1997.

Editor, One for Jimmy: An Anthology from the Hereford and Worcester Poetry Project. N.p., Hereford and Worcester County Council, 1992.

Editor, Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times, by Jo Shapcott. London, Faber, 1996.

Editor, with Ken Smith and Felix Post, Beyond Bedlam: Poems Written out of Mental Distress. London, Anvil Press Poetry, 1997.

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Critical Study: "The Permanent City: The Younger Irish Poets" by Gerald Dawe, in The Irish Writer and the City, edited by Maurice Harmon, Gerards Cross, Buckinghamshire, Smythe, and Totowa, New Jersey, Barnes and Noble, 1984.

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Matthew Sweeney's work does not sit comfortably in the canon of contemporary British or Irish poetry, and for a time his work did not receive the international recognition it has long deserved. There is little figurative language and almost no rhetoric in a typical Sweeney poem, and he bears a more fruitful comparison with certain American and eastern European poets. Curiously, his great strength and uniqueness among his contemporaries was inadvertently summed up in a negative review of his work by one particularly shrill Irish critic, who complained that his work was "uncontaminated by simile or metaphor." Indeed, although Sweeney can and does turn out remarkable similes with consummate skill, he will never attract readers who come to poetry for the easy glitter of surface tropes. Instead, he achieves his considerable effects by subtle shifts of tonal register within highly distilled, suggestive narratives and dramatic monologues. Furthermore, his poems are pervaded by a potent mixture of horror and humor reminiscent of Kafka and Beckett.

In "The Coffin Shop," for example, Sweeney depicts as truly repellent creatures the morticians who "recognise the recently alone," adding with typical quirkiness, "Their eyes are expressive as pandas /who have mastered maths …" But the humor in no way dilutes or softens the subtle horror of the final lines: "They poke the velvet cushions for the head, /they stand back and turn to face you / —you'd hardly decline if you could."

Sweeney has the uncanny ability to remind us of nightmares we had forgotten; childhood terrors, fear of bodily decrepitude, and the apocalypse are all embodied in his finely wrought parables. This darkness and bizarre wit often emerge slowly, welling up as the poem progresses, as in "Where Fishermen Can't Swim," the title of which sums up that potent blend of menace and fatalism—the intimation of disaster—that underscores so many of his best poems. The poem is set in Sweeney's native Donegal, where one morning "a lobster boat cast off, whose engine /croaked before the rocks were by." The youngest of the crew jumps out onto a rock to push the boat off and laughs when he cannot jump back, at which point the narrative takes a nightmarish turn: "But exactly when did he realise /that the boat would float no nearer …" The structure of this last phrase is repeated as Sweeney details the crew's desperate efforts to save the boy as the tide rises: "that all those pulls on the engine cord /would yield no shudders; that no rope /or lifebelt existed to be thrown; /that those flares were lost in cloud; /that the radio would bring a copter /an hour later? He had forty minutes— /to cling while the waves attacked, /to feel the rock gradually submerge. /And they had forty minutes of watching, /shouting into the radio, till he cried /out, sank from view, and stayed there." The rising sea is effectively mimed in the grammatical structures of the poem.

One of the most unexpected aspects of Sweeney's work is his formalism. Whereas many poets employ rhyme and meter in a clearly recognizable way in order to demonstrate their facility with language, Sweeney seems to take great pains to disguise difficult forms and rhymes. Perhaps this is because Sweeney, unlike many British and Irish poets, uses the aleatory qualities of form in composition in order to gain access to scenes or pictures that lie beneath waking consciousness. If the form exerts a subliminal effect on the reader, so much the better.

Particularly interesting in this regard is Sweeney's use of that most difficult of forms, the sestina. Many readers of the collection Blue Shoes will be surprised to discover that it contains two sestinas, "The Monk's Watch" and "The Queue." In both cases the repetition of words demanded by the form is skillfully camouflaged by the compelling flow of narrative. Similarly, poems like "The U Boat" and "Postcard of a Hanging" are so deftly and subtly rhymed that the form never intrudes and there remains after reading only a lingering sense of precision.

"Postcard of a Hanging" is one of Sweeney's best poems, revealing a moral complexity beneath its disturbing humor. It takes the form of a dramatic monologue spoken by a friend imagining "you" (perhaps the poet) receiving the grim postcard of the title. He pictures the recipient's disgust, with the image fading as he gradually surmises that the photograph is merely a trick, "a decadent oriental gimmick /to put liberals off their breakfast /of an egg, toast, jam and the rest." The second of the poem's three stanzas deals with the message on the reverse of the card, hinting at the sender's culinary and erotic adventures, in stark contrast to the banality of "an egg, toast, jam and the rest." When we return in the last stanza to reinspect the disturbing image, it is as if the poet's—and reader's—faith in the narrator's humanity has been subtly destabilized:

And you turned to the picture again,
a colour print—a gallows, two men,
one hooded, one holding a noose
of whitest rope, for the moment loose,
and low in the foreground a crowd
of men mainly, silently loud,
all eastern, except for two or three—
one of whom, if you look closely, is me.

Few poets writing in English can so gracefully guide us to the heart of darkness.

—Michael Donaghy