Donegal and Paris

My Life as a Painter, Matthew Sweeney, Bloodaxe, 2018, 79pp, £9.95 (paperback)

King of a Rainy Country, Matthew Sweeney, Arc Publications, 2018, 130pp, £10.99

Matthew Sweeney, who died in August 2018, was, for his generation, a major innovator in English poetry. Like his close friend and collaborator John Hartley Williams, Sweeney woke up one morning to realize that he should begin to write out his vision of an alternative reality, in a form he was later to describe as ‘imagistic narratives’. The poems that resulted were often shocking, dark and bleak; but always had a pithy and lasting sense of dark humour. They were oblique, but directly spoken, and contained within them a commitment to the art and craft of poetry. The resultant work won prizes and was translated into many languages, gaining him a significant international reputation. In his native Ireland, he was elected to Aosdana, that country’s highest creative honour. April 2018 saw the publication of a new collection, My Life as a Painter, and then in November, King of a Rainy Country, a very different kind of assemblage.

In spite of its title, My Life as a Painter is not consistently ekphrastic, but its masterful title poem describes a picture that Sweeney would like to paint. It is a literary painting in that it tells a story, brooding with the sinister dark browns and russets of the Old Masters. Three birds – a snipe, a crake and a wood-pigeon – wait on a plate to be eaten:

The three small birds my father brought me on a plate had been shot by him a week before, then plucked, gutted, and pot-roasted .. not by him, but my grandfather …

On seeing this nature morte, Sweeney speaks directly:

I often find a wish going through me to remake myself as a painter. These three birds would be perfect for my first work.

He considers adding a few colours and then:

I’d follow up with a long, flat portrait of three spectacularly blue-moulded loaves, all of them rye.

References to the poet’s father and indeed his grandfather, those who shot the birds and plucked them and brought them to the fledgling poet, suggest a family portrait with indeed brooding connotations. In the introduction to his 2014 collection, 21 Men and a Ghost, Sweeney stated that he was ‘made’ by the people he met, friends, men and women. Here we have a development of that and one closer to home – early family influences.

Another poem, which does have an ekphrastic quality, is the moving ‘Dialogue with an Artist,’ in which Sweeney ‘becomes’ L.S. Lowry and speaks of that artist’s loneliness to suggest how that painter served as his inspiration:

I would stand for hours in one spot and scores of little kids who hadn’t had a wash for weeks would group around me.

Had I not been lonely, none of my work would have happened, I should not have done what I’ve done, or seen what I’ve seen.

There’s something grotesque in me …

Again, in 21 Men and a Ghost, his oblique autobiography, Sweeney sees himself as finally unloved and wonders whether, should he return as a

ghost, he will be welcomed. The implicit question is whether there will be redemption. In the Lowry poem, that sense of the grotesque is indeed redeemed:

You’re right, there are grotesques who shine a dark light that lures us just as the sirens tried to lure… and yes, maybe we are among the grotesques, but there are also the beautiful who … save us from ourselves …

The compelling idea is that the ‘grotesque’ – in whatever form – can be saved not by art, but by loving people and it’s one that plays out here.

Sweeney had always used many different personae in his poems; in this collection, ‘The Old Xmas Tree’, has him imagining himself as a tree discarded after Christmas, that is left abandoned and again seeking a kind of afterlife or, indeed redemption after being discarded. He writes:

I lay down where it had been and I slept, and dreamt of Xmas, and presents placed under me, the gonks, the cards and angels in my branches, and me green again.

This is a sombre collection with many poems about death and superstition, and is not generally relieved by Sweeney’s familiar black and often surreal humour. But there is a trace of that surrealistic imagination in the final poem, ‘The Yellow Pole’, which also contains a sense of benediction:

Paint the pole yellow, stick it in the grave of a poet, but make sure the poet’s lying there.

Bring some new jazz to the ceremony (maybe German) and French wine, a case of twelve, at least.

At the stroke of noon, produce from your rucksack the white snake, and the red lizard, and allow them to climb up the yellow pole, the snake last, and both to sit there, like the flag of poetry, or of existence …

By way of contrast King of a Rainy Country arrives as ‘something completely different’. It is ostensibly a series of short pieces of writing, rather like diary entries, that recall in detail a month’s visit to Paris. Almost a travel book, it is lifted from that genre by Sweeney’s poetic prose and beautifully modulated poetic diction – and by his clearly stated poetic ambition:

I’ve bought Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris in translation, hoping that (even at this distance in time) they’ll offer a guide to this weird city that used to be his. That still is. And I’ll study them well, and learn how to negotiate the rapids of no line-breaks, no easy rhymes, no verse-rhythms, then I’ll become a modern version of that flâneur he was, and go out with my yellow notebook, my green pen, and maybe I’ll find a response.

Le Spleen de Paris was a series of fifty petits poèmes en prose (as Baudelaire described them) and Sweeney has produced here fifty short prose pieces, diary entries, and bits of flash fiction – each describing the events he witnessed and banlieues visits he made in his month in that city in 2016. They are a tribute to Baudelaire and, for the first time in his

work, an otherwise elusive poet speaks directly to his readers without recourse to metaphorical camouflage or to any surreal tendency. It is as though Sweeney for the first time is unguarded and natural in this new (and securely imitative) form.

Although Sweeney writes with exemplary clarity, he does allow his ‘green pen’ plenty of flourishes, and so each short piece becomes a well-told and colourful story that might befit any legendary Donegal seanchaí. He does not seek out the bizarre, but it does often find him. It is as if he were an innocent bystander and witness to some ‘mad’ events.

One of the more bizarre is an encounter with Les Saltimbanques – a family of street performers: a father, mother and ten-year-old boy. The man is dressed in a striking yellow and blue outfit with white leggings and black shoes and the boy in a checked black and white jump suit and is playing on a tambourine, while a black and white dog performs in step alongside him. The woman is dressed in red and is playing on a red tin whistle, on her head a white hat around which a snowy white owl flies about. Sweeney observes it as a picture worthy of the young Picasso or the old Chagall, or perhaps Gustave Doré. The cover of this book is indeed a reproduction of Gustav Doré’s famous Les Saltimbanques, a picture I find both bizarre and rather frightening; it lends an ominous (albeit unjustified) tone to this book.

One of the more amusing anecdotes (or diary entries, or petits poèmes en prose) is of a visit to the Cimetière du Montparnasse in search of Baudelaire’s grave. On the way he visits the resting place of Samuel Becket and remembers a previous pilgrimage:

As I was here, I decided also to pay homage to Becket. I’d once found his grave before and left a note on it – Godot here, where the fuck are you?

He then finds the tomb of Baudelaire and describes it tersely:

An off-white tombstone rising from the cement grey and white

stone that I would call scruffy. Not what I’d expected for arguably Frances’s greatest poet… on the flat stone loads of flowers, red mainly, a preponderance of roses. Some of these were withered. There were also, oddly enough, a number of Metro tickets, a twenty-cent coin, and a cigarette.

Sweeney then seeks to converse directly to his long-dead guide and mentor and asks him what he thought might happen next in France and if there was any way this living poet should be responding to what the nineteenthcentury Baudelaire might be thinking – but no reply is forthcoming. Sweeney ponders whimsically upon the thought that perhaps Baudelaire didn’t receive ‘transmissions’ in English. This passage reminds me of a poem Sweeney wrote for his dead father, again trying to communicate beyond the grave, which ponders whether he might try communicating in Irish rather than in English. I find it moving that this yearning for a truer link between the Irish poet and Baudelaire is so personal; it makes, after all, the concept of this literary imitation all the more sincere.

At one point, Sweeney rather charmingly acknowledges a sense of shame that he has not learned to speak the French language to a better degree and recalls an extraordinary example of EFL in reverse in his native Donegal:

I am ashamed that my command of the French language is so awful. I did one year at secondary school in Donegal and remember little except the priest who taught us (who later became the Bishop of Derry) had two straps for punishing us boys, one soft one he called madame, one tougher one he called monsieur.

Each of these fifty short imagist narratives are beguiling and amusing and they cover many banlieues in daylight while reeking of late-night fumes from wine bars and brasseries that intimate Baudelaire. It is a kind of intended interlude between more conventional collections. Sadly, it became his last publication for Sweeney died at 65 from motor neurone disease, just before publication of this book, the historic irony being that Baudelaire also died just before publication of Paris Spleen.