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Golly, a nice man wants to put a tube into my stomach, and his colleagues are pleading with me to simply let him. (The Tube)
The words lift off the page, as powerful as Keats’s “living hand” – but this voice from the grave has no self-pity:
They claim I could even still eat, with the tube sticking out of me, but how could I revel in a Wiener Schnitzel with that encumbrance?
No, that would be like eating on the train to the black camp...
Reading Shadow of the Owl (Bloodaxe Books, £10.99) is to be party to an intense freefall, as it happens to Matthew Sweeney. The darkest, strongest of his fabulist poems, streamed out in 10 months between his diagnosis with motor neuron disease and his death in 2018, the title sequence written when he waited for a diagnosis, finally delivered by an unseen neurologist via his mobile phone. At that moment, the poet Mary Noonan’s dazzling introduction tells us that he was almost “crushed by a passing car”:
Did he think I could wait forever, as if I were a rock? I sliced some cheddar and a heel of bread, opened the back door and went out...
No one but Sweeney the hypochondriac, Sweeney the epicure could lay it down with such wit and originality. The doctors’ multicoloured hairstyles in CUH’s dreary Coffee Doc become “smiles/ shoved up to the tops of their heads” to “help them deliver any news”. (Coloured Hair in the Garage). And when the stakes couldn’t be higher and even his bed becomes the enemy, Sweeney defiantly reloads his chief weapons: food and music:
I feel its suction when I come through the door, but I don’t go upstairs. I make for the kitchen, storm in, play Italian jazz loud, till Enrico Rava’s trumpet blows the blues away. Yeah, the blues ain’t just music no more, man. (The Sick Bed)
In a poem more than 30 years old, Paula Meehan’s mother appears:
Tongues of flame in her dark eyes, she’d say, ‘One of these days I must teach you to follow a pattern.’
In As If by Magic (Dedalus €18), Meehan’s selected poems show a life dedicated to mastering that pattern, “tongues of flame” ever-present in the passionate, exacting poems which fan out from her distinctive Dublin city childhood – Dublin to Germany and Greece. Childhood poems are expanded Chekhovian narratives – the magnificent Troika with its sad, funny eviction from an “illegal corporation tenancy” while minding chickens for a man called “Ucker Hyland” or the tender My Father’s Hands in Winter:
He’d button down the younger ones’ coats gingerly, and tie up the laces of their shoes and tuck in our scarves at our delicate throats
– an egg in each pocket to keep us warm...
Tenderness is one of many emotional registers. Would You Jump into My Grave as Quick, a contemporary rebuke to the woman who puts her “black eye on my man tonight/ in a Dublin bar, think/f irst of the steep drop, the six dark feet” could be an early Irish curse. Elsewhere, lamenting for the earth, her rhythmic, plangent Death of a Field marries old and new : “The end of dandelion is the start of Flash/ The end of dock is the start of Pledge”.
But the pattern, the beat is central, ever developing throughout this, fine substantial volume. Each nine-line poem from her last collection, Geomantic is nine syllables long, her eye and ear bending to the finest reduction of lyric, the merest trace of narrative yet holding the whole life in its small square:
‘Honour the dust...’ wrote Gary Snyder in my old copy of No Nature before Bella... got her teeth into it. Now dog eared... well chewed annotated... ockety shelf right beside the well made box wherein lies her wag...
“After all, we are but pounds of meat,” begins Cyphers, near the end of Alan Gillis’s The Readiness (Picador £10.99) – a coda for the preoccupations of this meditative collection:
We’re lifted from our ground by the swallows’ flight over fields of lint but can no more hold this than sound or light, or air. Like clock faces, we do our rounds.
Temporality is key, Gillis mining an idiosyncratic seam between nature and technology, town and country, day and night. Ciaran Carson’s influence is in the long lines of Before the Bustle of the Day, a dark aubade facing “the whigmaleeries of the ticking clock”, its preoccupation with worms recalling Carson’s Hamlet:
...worms get as juiced over a rotten avocado two weeks slimed and fuzzed in the compost bin as you might over the pleasure-mush and pimpled skin of ripe strawberries...
But this is the suburbs, not 1980s Belfast; explosions are not imminent:
you waver at the doorway wondering, when we leave the house do we exit or enter?... passing through the doorway... the half of you still in the hall thinks to whisper ‘let’s fake it’... while the half of you already outside answers ‘today will be what we make of it.’
Adjectives can be overpowering – the corned beef sandwich “In gicky lard and tallow that clabbered... pink shock of that blood-jellied slub...” (The Way to a Man’s Heart) – or tired “the hill’s wet breast” (Where They Sweep Down). Gillis’s plain bedroom is more successful with “no adjectives”, powerfully unstable, “A lifetime of work to own a house/ A lifetime of work to find a voice.” There is no floor or ceiling, he remembers:
I was sinking, outside a bedroom window one freezing dawn, the sky... grey formless... having paced the night to nowhere in particular... – to this window – I suppose thinking if this is home then I’m at sea, at sea... (The Interior)