Poetry: Black Moon By Matthew Sweeney Cape, 68pp. £9This is the second of two books - Sanctuary was published in 2004 - that explore Matthew Sweeney's experience of living in Eastern Europe; he has lived for a number of years in Timisoara, near Bucharest.
The shattered landscape of post-Ceausescu Romania has proven to be a happy hunting ground for Sweeney's inventive imagination, the political inertia of the infant state mirroring a private ennui that has been a central preoccupation of his nine books to date. Sweeney's intuitive temperament - Sylvia Plath is a major early influence - allows for a poetry that absorbs the whole of human experience, the blood-letting that comes with the collapse of empire, and a loss of faith in outdated belief systems.
While the Sweeney of Black Moon - which is on the shortlist for the TS Eliot Prize, to be announced on Monday - allows himself to be led down labyrinthine ways, there is always a Zen-like awareness, or sixth sense, taking it's cue from the physical world of experience rather than from the cerebral regions of the brain: "then I might/ approach the state of skin covered bone/ I aspire to" (The Hunger Artist at Home).
A feel for the heart rather than the head allows him to follow the strange logic of dreams, to make daring imaginative leaps. The head of a beheaded American GI being prepared for a propaganda shoot in a television studio redeems the indignity of its public humiliation: "the eyes sprang open/ the stare came up close/ . . . ventriloquised laughter came from the head which was rocking" (Primetime).
A mid-career decision to write children's poetry (he has written numerous children's books and edited the Faber Book of Children's Verse) revived Sweeney's muse, allowed him access to a primal innocence, to get inside his own defences (a core personal belief) and a way of seeing through the complex emotional defence mechanisms that distract us from a true understanding of ourselves.
Reggae, with its nod to the medieval fool motif, is vintage Sweeney: "humming a reggae song, he bopped/ along the road, doffing his rainbow hat/ to a pair of chatting ladies/ who stared at his hair, tut tutting ".
A nose for the acoustics of the moment, for the inner weather of an emotion, makes him a formidable myth maker. Pilgrim Sweeney's seemingly casual narratives lead into unexpected territory - The Doors is a terrific evocation of the fight or flight syndrome hard-wired into the human psyche - "Behind the door was another door/ and behind that was another/ . . . I looked back at the door/ heard the lock click, then beyond/ another lock, then another".
Sweeney's own experience of Malin - he was born in the Inishowen district of Donegal - has seeped subconsciously into the work, the yarns of the fireside story tellers ideal templates to convey, but also temper, the hyper imaginings of a Gothically inclined personality. Down from the trees, the Suibhne (the mad king of the Irish sagas) of these later books, is less anxious, less prone (mercifully) to the rigorous navel-gazing of the earlier books, more inclined to take his cue from Zen than from Kafka: "Others, though, stayed in their space/ . . . Then bowing I got into my boat/ Untied the rope, yanked out the harpoon/ And aimed the boat at the great ocean". (Practice)
It's tempting to think of Matthew Sweeney as a possible guru for a new generation of younger readers - his off-beat parables (accessible and reflective of a general unease) ought to fit the bill - a true original and a more substantial icon than the over-hyped poseurs of our age of "celebrity".
Eugene O'Connell's new collection of poems, Babushka, is forthcoming. He is an editor with the Cork Literary ReviewPoetry