A RICH TROVE OF MEMORABLE, FUNNY AND ALARMING POEMS OF DISGUISED COMPLEXITY

Sean O'Brien analyses the work of a poet he recommends we read afresh

MATTHEW SWEENEY
Selected Poems 1957-1987
Cape Poetry £10.00

The poem 'Singing Class', from Matthew Sweeney's second book, A Round House (1983), imagines:

... one boy at least in their midst
dumb for an hour, mouthing air
the song-words flitting through his head
his eyes never leaving the inspector.

The situation is characteristic. Sweeney's entire world of rituals and chilly narrative tableaux opens up from here, but we might also read the poem in the light of the question every Irish poet must ask at some point, in the knowledge that there might not be an answer: What To Do After Yeats?

The 'inspector' might well be the senatorial 'smiling sixty year-old public man' of 'Among School Children', and the singing lesson/singing school speaks for itself. The boy in the poem longs to satisfy or appease the inspector but cannot do as required. He must find another way.

Sweeney's escape and liberation has been both geographical and cultural. He has lived all his adult life outside Ireland, and the places in which he has sought his poetic examples have been the United States and German-speaking Europe. The poets to whom he has been drawn are not necessarily epochal figures like Yeats; they tend to be good poets who write good poems which ask to be read as individual works rather than the building-blocks of a critical empire. It is an approach which has more in common with the intelligent general reader than the systematizing critic, and this preference for moving from poem to poem rather than opus to canon is also common among poets. It is also the editorial principle of Emergency Kit (1996), the anthology of 'poems for strange times' which Sweeney edited with Jo Shapcott. It's an approach which contradicts recent proposals that there can only be a handful of poets worth reading in any one period.

Setting aside the suspicion that such views are voiced mainly in order to prevent depression among novel-reading reviewers, for whom poetry can be a bit of a stretch, the merit of Sweeney's alternative is that it avoids the cult of personality which tends to grow up around 'major' figures and instead concentrate on the words on the page. Nor is scale an issue - as is shown by this severely pruned Selected Poems, which is drawn from seven adult and three children's collections.

The fact that poetry is a discipline - of form, music, rhetoric and so on - makes it at any rate a cousin to ritual and obsession. In Sweeney's case poetry looks like a way of making use of these afflictions, and of converting anxiety into a source of illumination. Sweeney's universe is that of Catholicism without God, or even before God, where pagan superstition and ominousness reassert themselves minus the domesticating influence of a theological position. It is a world of signs, and of things that purport to be signs, and of things the poet needs to be signs, but it promises no heaven. If this means that the world is more interesting than a flatly materialist account would allow, the outcome is, of course, in some ways more threatening as well.

'On My Own', a brief narrative of absconding from boarding school while allegedly involved in a cross country race, makes it clear that there are no safeguards in this world: 'I think of last week, and McArdle / headless when the train had gone.' To survive such conditions necessitates a kind of conspiratorial detachment, a young man's inoculation against surprise, a relish of grim humour and futility. For several of Sweeney's characters (McArdle included) events and meaning are at an end, which is a form of liberation: the early 'View From a Hammock' recommends the dedicatee to

Hear the head empty of sounds.
Swing the eyes in an arc, on a city of
leaves, shutters, moonlit shreds of sky.

The almost neutral attentiveness which results here crops up again more sinisterly in 'Hanging', from Cacti (1992) - a third-person narration which imagines what a man hanging from a lamppost sees. The theme receives its most interesting treatment in 'The U-Boat', where one of Sweeney's curious idlers amuses himself by swimming through the sunken wreck of a submarine:

... I slide past my friend
the skeleton, until my breath runs low,
then I hit the surface he saw long ago
but never quite saw in the end.

Death is close - in a sense it is a 'friend' - but equally it is as far beyond the deliberate reach of the living as our world seems to be for the dead. Death might threaten to cancel the imagination of the living, but Sweeney treats it almost companionably ('my friend the skeleton') and it is the unstated accompanist or context of many of the poems. 'The Shadow Home' and 'A Daydream Ahead', for example, two poems of domestic disquiet, both put the narrator in this 'absent' position - in the one case exiled by an alternative secret family life imagined by his daughter, in the other as a husband vanished from his wife's world:

The car you bought
stays white that first spring,
or it does in my imagining
as I daydream ahead
and I am not there.

The mood which accompanies this daydreamed absence is, again, neutral, curious, accepting, as though drained of volition in the act of obliging the imagination to state its own opposite. In this Sweeney seems to be an original.

Sweeney's marking out of characteristic subject-matter and mood is accompanied by an approach to diction which has now become so familiar that its radicalism is easy to overlook. Elaborate figures of speech and all but the barest description are excluded in favour of a completely uncluttered, seemingly transparent idiom which owes a good deal to American poets including Frost and Charles Simic and, perhaps, to the short stories of Raymond Carver. A huge sector of rhetorical possibilities is simply abandoned, in a move quite counter to the ornate and even rococo procedures of some of Sweeney's notable contemporaries, including Paul Muldoon, Michael Donaghy, Ian Duhig, Carol Ann Duffy and Jo Shapcott, all of whom allow themselves a much greater latitude not only of vocabulary but also of reference. It is tempting to read the bare outlines of Sweeney's work as a sign of the original landscapes of his life, his native County Donegal, whose stern coastline prompted one of his finest poems, 'Where Fishermen Can't Swim', which is worthy of comparison with Frost's 'Out, Out'. Sweeney's is a strategy of separation which has had its influence: bad 'school of Sweeney' has the bareness but not, of course, his sense of imaginative compulsion.

One widespread feature of poetry in the last quarter of century in which Sweeney has clearly shared is the renewed exploration of narrative. For some poets, including Muldoon, Derek Walcott, Craig Raine and Glyn Maxwell, this has entailed capacious constructions, of an order nowadays more familiar in the novel. What Sweeney offers are narratives in miniature, vignettes, cross-sections through larger events, and the effect tends to be enigmatic rather than expansive. The work rarely ends as mere anecdote. Even an unsuccessful poem such as 'The Blue Taps' is likely to be pushing at its own apparent limits. The presiding anxiety can make itself felt not only in a poem's narrative donnee, but in a prodding, insistent humour, as well as the ritual completism of the whole thing. In 'The Butcher', a butcher returns from the dead and goes to work in his former premises, now a betting shop

The ribbons of prize ainimals he'd bought,
the great hooks that held the joints,
the spike for the customers' accounts –
all these materialise around him

and we see that what's at stake is no mere reversal of mortality but a folktale or mythic sense of death as being properly part of the furnishing of everyday life, despite equally everyday denials. At any rate, Sweeney suggests, the imagination has a prior authority. It is perhaps this view which lends pity and horror to 'in the Ice', his remarkably down-to-earth version from Canto XXXII of Dante's Inferno:

... I saw
at my feet two melded together,
so much they had the one hair.
'Tell me,' I said, 'who you are.'
They raised their faces and cried
tears that froze at once, locking
their eyes, then they butted each other.'

Where Dante receives a safe conduct through the under-world, Sweeney has in effect acquired dual poetic citizenship - on the one hand of his adopted city of London and of other cities in Europe and elsewhere; on the other hand, of his native territory, which answers sophistication with a bare-boned authority. The combination suggests that in some respects he's not so far from Yeats after all. Twenty-five years' work find Sweeney at fifty with a rich trove of memorable, funny, alarming poems whose very readability at times disguises their complexity. Here is a poet who has never allowed himself to be distracted - a poet, too, whose work all those of us who think we know it well had better read afresh.

Sean O'Brien's Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 will be published by Picador in autumn 2002. His version of Aristophanes' The Birds will be staged at the National Theatre this summer. Radio 3 will broadcast The Black Path, a play co-written with Julia Darling, in June. His most recent collection of poems, Downriver, won the Forward Prize. He teaches the writing MA at Sheffield Hallam University and lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.