{"id":168,"date":"2011-02-15T09:54:01","date_gmt":"2011-02-15T09:54:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=168"},"modified":"2011-02-15T09:54:01","modified_gmt":"2011-02-15T09:54:01","slug":"ken-head-reviews-matthew-sweeneys-the-night-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/ken-head-reviews-matthew-sweeneys-the-night-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Ken Head reviews Matthew Sweeney's 'The Night Post'"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Night Post:  A New Selection<\/span>  <\/span>Matthew Sweeney<\/a>.  <\/span>Salt (Modern Poets Series)<\/a>
ISBN:  978 1 907773 01 3    Hardback:  \u00a310.39.   192pp<\/span>

As any editor will tell you, writers aren\u2019t 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\u2019s poetry since the nineteen-eighties (Is it really almost thirty years since <\/span>A Dream of Maps<\/span>?), it  occurred to me to wonder, as I began <\/span>The Night Post<\/span>, how well this selection by the poet himself would work.  Would there be a sense of <\/span>d\u00e8ja vu<\/span>?  How many previously unpublished poems would be included?  How much very early or very recent work( Sweeney\u2019s last collection, <\/span>Black Moon<\/span>, 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.    <\/span>

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.  <\/span>The Night Post<\/span> connects to Sweeney\u2019s 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, <\/span>3 a.m. or thereabouts, a moonless \/ sky,<\/span> two officers checking vehicles for contraband and weapons, the unspoken question made very clear <\/span>when the Mercedes hearse came along<\/span>:<\/span>

I moved my beam down the long box<\/span>
trying to picture the bloodless face \u2013 <\/span>
was a beard still growing there, or<\/span>
did it breathe, indeed, eyes on the lid,<\/span>
or were there dozens of Armalites?<\/span>

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\u2019d earlier <\/span>waved a whiskey-smuggler through \/ after receiving a sample<\/span>?  The last two lines of the poem give us his answer, wry, laconic and cinematic, too:  <\/span>I bid the man a gruff goodnight, \/ walked in, envying his Brando face<\/span>. A Godfather moment, potential violence sidestepped with deadpan humour, but dealt with just the same, as the narrator tells us what he won\u2019t include in his official report or admit to in front of television cameras, that he doesn\u2019t want to die.<\/span>

Sweeney is a master of such concise narratives, poems whose sheer readability draws us into their many levels of tension and complexity.  In <\/span>The Night Post<\/span>, the central issues are moral and political, to do with the nature of duty and its limits, but turn the page and <\/span>The Mugging<\/span>, 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, <\/span>mugged twice … \/ on Leather Lane and Gray\u2019s Inn Road<\/span>, a nightmare from which he is grateful to wake and find that <\/span>This time … the dream-borders held<\/span>.  Not that the distancing mechanism of the dream lessens the impact of the poem, quite the opposite:<\/span>

The first boys were amiable, even joked<\/span>
as I fobbed them off with a fiver each.<\/span>

The second lot went through my pockets,<\/span>
kicked me, left me with my clothes.<\/span>
I recognized no one in either crowd.<\/span>

The light from the lamppost showed rain<\/span>
as their steps echoed through empty streets.<\/span>

Insecure frontiers between order and chaos, safety and violence, helpless individuals always under threat even if they don\u2019t know it, these are recurrent concerns.  <\/span>Fog<\/span>, 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:  <\/span>Masked like a murderer, I \/ miraculously find a busstop … \/ And the fogsoldiers close in round me<\/span>, while towards the end of the selection, <\/span>A Day In Calcutta<\/span>, 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 <\/span>fierce red eyes<\/span> of the black goddess Kali carved in stone, but looking as if<\/span> she could tear us into pieces<\/span>, until:<\/span>
    <\/span>
we were outside<\/span>
and heading back to our shoes<\/span>
when I saw, in a crowd of men,<\/span>
two tethered goats, <\/span>
one young, one a baby, both  <\/span>
big-eyed and curious,<\/span>
especially the eldest, until grabbed<\/span>
at both ends, his neck stretched,<\/span>
then a flash<\/span>
of a knife and his head was in the dust.<\/span>

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:  <\/span>

\u2018Did Blackstaff do it?<\/span>
Is he the fucker we want?\u2019<\/span>
We banged on the hatch of that houseboat,<\/span>
under a blood-red moon,<\/span>
while a police siren weaved among the flats<\/span>
and a dog howled till a shot rang out.<\/span>
…<\/span>
\u2018Tell Blackstaff there\u2019s a bullet<\/span>
waiting for his skull,\u2019 we shouted …<\/span>

(from The Houseboat<\/span>)<\/span>

This, for me, is what makes Sweeney\u2019s poetry both valuable and interesting.  He doesn\u2019t emote or moralise and isn\u2019t 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:<\/span>

The clarinet is playing through the ruined church,<\/span>
gathering the ghosts to stand in the choir<\/span>

and rescue from their deaths the voices they had,<\/span>
which they send soaring, swooping on the wind<\/span>

and each ghost remembers the coffin stood there,<\/span>
the relatives weeping, the secret of the light.<\/span>

(The Ghost Choir<\/span>)<\/span>

For readers who know Sweeney\u2019s work, this selection represents a real refresher course in what exciting modern poetry\u2019s about, were I reading him for the first time, I\u2019d find it a treasure trove.<\/span>



<\/font> <\/p>\n

…..Reviewed by \u00a92011:  Ken Head <\/a> <\/span>
<\/font><\/div>\n


<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Night Post:  A New Selection  Matthew Sweeney.  Salt (Modern Poets Series)ISBN:  978 1 907773 01 3    Hardback:  \u00a310.39.   192ppAs any editor will tell you, writers aren\u2019t 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-168","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}