Matthew Sweeney
Bleakly humorous poet who charmed children with images of talking animals and flying plants
MATTHEW SWEENEY, who has died aged 65, was a poet whose dark imagination and humour leaps out of work that he crafted with a childlike directness. He was wry about how he would be remembered: “Mostly what awaits the poet is posthumous oblivion,” he told an interviewer shortly before his death. Although he identified the contribution he made to a more international poetry, not least by writing as an Irishman in a distinctly German tradition, his legacy is just as likely to be through his work as a writer and communicator with a strong connection to children.
He was, for example, the editor of The New Faber Book of Children’s Poems (2003). He was clear that he wasn’t selecting poems that were simply nonsense or noisy, because he felt that children were no less capable than adults of understanding themes such as love and death. In Sweeney’s own poetry for children, he steered away from bleaker visions, but was more comfortable than many poets about visiting schools. He once remarked of his poet friends: “They don’t or can’t write for kids. They go into a school a couple of times and they ring me up and they’re panicking. ‘How the hell do you do this stuff?’ they ask. ‘I’m going up the walls and it’ll take me a year to recover’.”
His world of talking animals and flying plants may have straddled the generations, but it owed as much to his deep understanding of different cultures. In one poem he imagined what the result would be if he put his native Co Donegal in the oven and baked it: Arizona, it turned out. He admired magical realist writers such as Márquez, but preferred to call his work “alternative realism”, so that events could be described convincingly enough but veer away from the possible. Here, his role models were German-language narrative writers such as Heinrich Böll and, most particularly, Franz Kafka.
This approach led him away from the more lyrical Irish tradition of Yeats and Heaney, and he is sometimes considered more a European than an Irish poet. He began to make his name when living in London, and was exposed to fertile influences when living in Germany. In turn, though, he had a profound influence on new Irish poets, particularly those with whom he worked when he settled in Cork such as Brendan Kennelly and Paul Durcan. In fact, one of his poems imagines his bolshie retort to a judge when charged with reading Paul Durcan’s poetry while driving along a motorway. “And it wasn’t a novel I was reading – / the thing about poems, Your Honour, / is they’re mostly short. You can look up / between them, or between stanzas, / and see what’s happening ahead.”
It is a revealing glimpse of someone who devoted his life to poetry. Sweeney reflected, “Poetry has been central to my life, and despite the lack of money it brings, I would do it all over again.” But he did so with a sharp and charmingly wicked sense of what poets do. With his friend and sometimes sparring partner John Hartley Williams he wrote a parody of thrillers called Death Comes for the Poets (2012) in which bards are murdered in a way that reflects their oeuvre. Characters were conflations of actual poets, but not so recognisable that anyone could sue for libel. The poets’ milieu was adroitly skewered with such dialogue as “Did you see von Zitzewitz’s latest haiku in The Independent?” “Saw it, Laurie. Just didn’t have time to read it all.”
Matthew Sweeney was born on October 6 1952 in Lifford, Co Donegal, to Clement and Josephine Sweeney. He recalled being an incessant reader, an experience he evoked in a poem for children: “And he stayed in his bed / half the day if he could, / reading by candlelight / when the storms struck / and the electricity died. / How do I know all this? / You’d guess how if you tried.”
At boarding school – Gormanston College, near Dublin – he and his friends found refuge from bullying by reading and writing poetry. Coleridge was an early model, though when Sweeney imitated him and gave the result to the Head of English, the teacher told him that “poetry is something one grows out of ”, and handed it back unread. Later Sweeney commented, “Because the school was run by monks, monks keep appearing in my poetry, usually having a very very bad time.”
He studied Sciences at University College, Dublin, and then German and English in London. His years in London and Germany were crucial to his work. In 1979 he married Rosemary Barber, with whom he had two children. At about this time, his first collections appeared, starting with A Dream of Maps (1981). His work was published by Raven Arts Press, later by Jonathan Cape, and finally by Bloodaxe Books. This year Bloodaxe published his last collection, My Life as a Painter. The book is as rich in sustained metaphors as earlier work, and with growing intimations of his own mortality: the last piece envisages a gathering at a poet’s graveside.
Around the time of completing that volume, last autumn, Sweeney was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, of which his sister had also been a victim. He wrote about his illness indirectly, with dark imagery, and despite severe physical impairment continued to correspond and write with characteristic clarity until the end.
As much as through his work, his influence will endure through his lively engagement with poets of all generations, through readings, residencies and poetry competitions. He was a member of Aosdána, the Irish body of 250 outstanding artists, though he was an unlikely establishment figure, often seen in a leather jacket and heard excoriating poetry’s gatekeepers. None the less, after his death he was honoured by an event at the Triskel Arts Centre in Cork that was attended by the city’s mayor and the President of Ireland’s aide-de-camp.
Matthew Sweeney is survived by a daughter and son, as well as by Mary Noonan, whom he met when returning to Ireland after spells in Berlin and Timisoara, Romania. He settled with her in Cork.