“Poetry has been central to my life and despite the lack of money it brings, I would do it all over again.” – Matthew Sweeney
Matthew Sweeney was diagnosed with motor neurone disease in October 2017, and he died in August 2018. He wrote most of the poems in Shadow of the Owl in the intervening 10 months, and it now seems as if his entire life in poetry – he published 12 full collections in his lifetime – was preparation for this final work.
Matthew considered it a privilege to have lived his life as a poet. Once he had his diagnosis, he didn’t want to know his prognosis. He didn’t want to be told he was dying. He wanted to fight the illness, even though this was a hopeless endeavour.
A long poem, The Owl, is the wellspring from which the book emerged. The 12 stanzas of this poem were written over as many nights, in September 2017, as Matthew waited for the final diagnosis. In order to process his fear, he imagined a menacing owl coming, nightly to the garden but refusing to be seen and refusing to deliver his message.
Matthew didn’t know where the poem wanted to take him, but his habit of writing directly from his unconscious came to his aid as he sat, night after night, converting his distress into episodes in the history of the taciturn owl. The poem proved to be premonitory: when the diagnosis did come, on the afternoon of October 11th, 2017, it was delivered, by an unseen neurologist, via mobile phone.
Matthew was at the bookies when he got the call, and he stumbled out into the street, narrowly missing being 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. The moon
turned his big eye onto me, and I saw him wobble.
The stars hummed along. Where am I going?
I shouted at all of them. There was no response.
Then far off, I heard a faint huhuhu followed by
a whoo. You cowardly bastard!, I roared, and
sprayed the arrows all-over the blackened world.
(The Owl)
Although the “cowardly” neurologist failed to look his patient in the eye, the poet did not shy away from the task facing him. In the 10 months that remained to him, Matthew produced his last book, a sequence of dark fables charting the peregrinations of a hapless figure hounded by a procession of invisible enemies who want him dead. The poet was writing for his life.
Assailants and disposal
Each poem is an extended metaphor for the particular situation Matthew found himself in. His assailants – kidnappers, assassins, liars all – have a wide range of methods at their disposal: crucifixion, hanging, bombing, shooting (by bullet or arrow), mauling by crocodile, death by agreeing to lie down in a strange drawer, or drink from the mysterious jar of sake that appears on the garden wall and is constantly replenished – but by whom?
All of Matthew’s verve and spiky humour are here in these last poems, which follow, as always, the unnerving logic of dreams. But the dream has become a nightmare, and the catastrophe, impending in all the earlier collections, has now come to pass.
In a late interview, he remembered the words of one of the writers whose work was most important to him: “Franz Kafka in his last diary entry, on June 12th, 1923, said in connection with his fast-progressing illness: ‘It happens whether you like it or not . . . More than consolation is: you too have weapons.’ The weapons he alludes to were his writing and I have found the same thing.”
The sphere of action is now reduced to the gardens and banks of the river Lee in Cork, in the company of the cats and birds that inhabit the suburban garden – the wild, fugitive days spent navigating the murky borderlands of central and eastern Europe, that feature in the earlier poems, are but a memory.
But the imaginative scope of the poems is undiminished – if anything, the persona on the run in these poems needs to reach new heights of ingenuity, to become even more inventive and wily, if he is to escape – just – the most horrible of deaths, over and over again.
The technique he had developed over a lifetime, and which had enabled him to compile his own peculiar grimoire or book of spells as protection against the full range of human terror and anxiety, now came to his aid. The poems became weapons with which to fight the arch-enemy. The biggest challenge was to overcome his fear, which was now great.
Hunters and hunted
Like many (most?) poets, he could only produce poems if he was feeling reasonably buoyant. And so, the reader must ask how a poet who has been given such a diagnosis could infuse his final collection, written in the final months of his life, with such tenderness for all the world’s creatures, the hunters and the hunted, without bitterness or judgment?
In the last days of Matthew’s life, which were spent in hospital, a senior doctor approached his bed and made a point of telling him that he only had days to live. Matthew was on his own at the time. Once the unwanted prognosis had been delivered, the doctor had the temerity to ask him how he felt. “A great sadness,” he said. He wrote his last poem in the intensive care unit of the hospital.
In an inscription to one of his books, dated July 11th, 1995, the poet Ted Hughes wrote these words for Matthew Sweeney: “When among wolves, howl and devour.” Matthew does howl in these poems, but the pain expressed is that of leaving the world behind. He lived his life with exceptional vibrancy and a huge desire for everything the world could offer him.
For more than 40 years, he sought to capture, in poetry, the life of a body – menaced, yes, condemned to wander, mapless, in a ruined, terrifying place – but a body fully alive to the sensuous pleasures of the world, and the vulnerability of exposure to its loss. His final poems are therefore imbued with a lyrical beauty, arising from his distress at leaving the world. But his spirit burned very brightly until his final breath, and the poems bear witness to that fact.
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, this one with no skeletal
survivors liberated by a victorious militia.
I want to stay off that train as long as I can,
despite all the exhortations to board now.
I want to be myself till the last minute.
(The Tube)
Shadow of the Owl was published by Bloodaxe Books in October and will be reviewed in The Irish Times next month
