The Night Post: A New Selection Matthew Sweeney. Salt (Modern Poets Series)
ISBN: 978 1 907773 01 3 Hardback: £10.39. 192pp
As any editor will tell you, writers aren’t always the wisest judges of their own work, either of its quality or how best to present it to potential buyers of their books and having been a reader of Matthew Sweeney’s poetry since the nineteen-eighties (Is it really almost thirty years since A Dream of Maps?), it occurred to me to wonder, as I began The Night Post, how well this selection by the poet himself would work. Would there be a sense of dèja vu? How many previously unpublished poems would be included? How much very early or very recent work( Sweeney’s last collection, Black Moon, was published in 2007)? Having published so much, how would he go about sequencing such a generously extensive new selection of (unless my adding up is wrong) one hundred and thirty-two poems? Needless to say, when read, the poems themselves, as they always should, not only answered all my questions, but at the same time raised others, about context, what effects new juxtapositionings might have on the way poems would present themselves and how I, as a reader, would respond.
Sweeney was born in Donegal in 1952 and is one of a distinguished generation of post-war Irish poets, so that it is not without significance that his chosen title for this collection should be taken from a poem that plunges us back into the world of The Troubles. The Night Post connects to Sweeney’s life in a more personal way as well, in that his brother, from whom he has said the basis of the poem came, is a recently retired member of the Gardai, the Irish police force. The scene is set quickly and economically, an isolated police post, a cold night, 3 a.m. or thereabouts, a moonless / sky, two officers checking vehicles for contraband and weapons, the unspoken question made very clear when the Mercedes hearse came along:
I moved my beam down the long box
trying to picture the bloodless face –
was a beard still growing there, or
did it breathe, indeed, eyes on the lid,
or were there dozens of Armalites?
Does the narrator do his duty and risk a bullet or let the hearse pass without looking inside the coffin, in the same way he’d earlier waved a whiskey-smuggler through / after receiving a sample? The last two lines of the poem give us his answer, wry, laconic and cinematic, too: I bid the man a gruff goodnight, / walked in, envying his Brando face. A Godfather moment, potential violence sidestepped with deadpan humour, but dealt with just the same, as the narrator tells us what he won’t include in his official report or admit to in front of television cameras, that he doesn’t want to die.
Sweeney is a master of such concise narratives, poems whose sheer readability draws us into their many levels of tension and complexity. In The Night Post, the central issues are moral and political, to do with the nature of duty and its limits, but turn the page and The Mugging, for example, takes us into an equally edgy world, though this time of casual street violence in which the narrator dreams he is the victim, mugged twice … / on Leather Lane and Gray’s Inn Road, a nightmare from which he is grateful to wake and find that This time … the dream-borders held. Not that the distancing mechanism of the dream lessens the impact of the poem, quite the opposite:
The first boys were amiable, even joked
as I fobbed them off with a fiver each.
The second lot went through my pockets,
kicked me, left me with my clothes.
I recognized no one in either crowd.
The light from the lamppost showed rain
as their steps echoed through empty streets.
Insecure frontiers between order and chaos, safety and violence, helpless individuals always under threat even if they don’t know it, these are recurrent concerns. Fog, for example, which opens the book, describes humorously the problems of coping with thick fog, but does so in language imbued with threats of violence: Masked like a murderer, I / miraculously find a busstop … / And the fogsoldiers close in round me, while towards the end of the selection, A Day In Calcutta, which describes exactly that, leads us along (Might this be travelogue?) gently enough, despite warning references to the redness of the flesh of Indian mangoes and the fierce red eyes of the black goddess Kali carved in stone, but looking as if she could tear us into pieces, until:
we were outside
and heading back to our shoes
when I saw, in a crowd of men,
two tethered goats,
one young, one a baby, both
big-eyed and curious,
especially the eldest, until grabbed
at both ends, his neck stretched,
then a flash
of a knife and his head was in the dust.
Violence, or the threat of it, bloodshed, or the threat of it and the poet bearing clear-eyed, unflinching witness to the world he passes through:
‘Did Blackstaff do it?
Is he the fucker we want?’
We banged on the hatch of that houseboat,
under a blood-red moon,
while a police siren weaved among the flats
and a dog howled till a shot rang out.
…
‘Tell Blackstaff there’s a bullet
waiting for his skull,’ we shouted …
(from The Houseboat)
This, for me, is what makes Sweeney’s poetry both valuable and interesting. He doesn’t emote or moralise and isn’t sentimental, but looks his world (which I feel also to be mine) in the eye and tells, through the voice of one or other of his many different narrators and often with very deceptive simplicity, the stories of what he sees:
The clarinet is playing through the ruined church,
gathering the ghosts to stand in the choir
and rescue from their deaths the voices they had,
which they send soaring, swooping on the wind
and each ghost remembers the coffin stood there,
the relatives weeping, the secret of the light.
(The Ghost Choir)
For readers who know Sweeney’s work, this selection represents a real refresher course in what exciting modern poetry’s about, were I reading him for the first time, I’d find it a treasure trove.
