Elsewhere with equipoise: six poets.(Literature)

I'LL TAKE THESE six poets in no special order ... ... And in describing the poems of Matthew Sweeney I'll begin elsewhere, because the tension entailed in the phrase, "being elsewhere", is apt for the character of Sweeney's work.

Years ago I glimpsed a book title by the American poet Charles Simic which was Return to a Place Lit by a Glass of Milk. There may have been an apposite cover-photo, I may have read the volume, but can now recall only the title's phrase. Why? I found it a spellbinding title, familiar in its objects, yet strange in its stillness, its isolating stillness. Here a small, central luminescence asserted itself in a surrounding dark. Glass and milk were distinct, simple, numinous, perhaps possessed of some symbolic, some psychological resonance, but detached from every other thing by the indistinctness around them.

The London-based Irishman Matthew Sweeney's Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape, about $30) contain 117 short verse narratives taken from his ten collections of poetry, and both the atmosphere and the method of their storytelling have the qualities I ascribe to the Simic image. With lightness of tone, a fabulist daring and concision, they isolate odd persons, things, events, from the distracting networks of the familiar world. They resemble case histories from a time when detectives could pursue one case at a time.

Let me quote a sample in its entirety, because it is impossible to extract from the kind of poem-story Sweeney writes without making it meaningless.

 
   The horse fell in the harbour, 
   Was splashing in the water 
   With the cart strapped to his back. 
   And a cyclist with sunglasses 
   And a woman with a pram 
   Kept on going--but not the man 
   With the mongrel in a sack. 
   He dropped all and dived straight in. 
 
   The horse kept neighing 
   While the man was saving him 
   And the dog was chewing free. 
   Maybe the horse knew 
   That the man was on his way 
   To drown the dog. Maybe the dog 
   Had barked this to the horse. 
   Oh, there were bones in the cart. 
   ("Bones") 

Here is the fabulist's art, simplicity of statement, a close logic in the sequence of actions, an economy of images and characters. The effect is utterly cogent, yet it defamiliarises what we know. Perception and logic are both exact, but re-aligned at a slight variance from each other. We have seen this defamiliarising purpose in Kafka, and in the work of Vasko Popa, Miroslav Holub and others, but Sweeney makes of the method his own world. This world embraces the imagery of surrealist cinema, for instance, a lone girl wading in the sea in a white dress ("Wading"), or the predicament of the guardian of the women's loo in Waterloo in the poem of that title, where the humour is mordant and the dramatic monologue exact. Equally it makes play between the plausible and the fabulous, as when a couple flee their home before a volcano, while imagining the lava sculptures they will find there on return ("Volcano").

In the last poem of the book, wryly entitled "Sweeney" and recasting the legend of the accursed braggart warrior of Irish folklore, a hapless suburbanite finds himself turning into a crow while able to watch the changes in his house with his human feelings.