In his volume “The Peregrine Falcon”, one of the basic books of Nature Writing, John Alec Baker not only sees the falcons that give the title, but also pigeons, snipes and owls. The latter usually sit somewhere on the edge and watch the scenery. Sometimes they appear out of nowhere and surprise the narrator: “An owl climbed out of the meadow and flew close to me. Its round, white face slowly looked back, its large, drooping head turned in astonishment.”
One such owl flits across the pages at the very beginning of Matthew Sweeney’s last volume of poetry. Except that here it is the speaker of the verses who is amazed. Amazed because he never sees the owl, only hears it, “a weak one Huhuhu“. And because he believes that the owl has a message for him,” a few words in their night language “, which would probably not help him because people do not understand this night language.
Sweeney even gives everyday words great musical power
Matthew Sweeney’s “The Owl’s Shadow” is a farewell book. The poet from Donegal wrote almost all of the 70 poems in just under a year after he was diagnosed with an incurable disease in autumn 2017. Death was already one of the great stimuli of the poems in the selection volume “Hund und Mond” (2017). Now it is the dark center around which the eponymous owl circles, but which also attracts other flying beings: crows, starlings, parrots, an albatross, and Edgar-Allan-Poe’s ravens and a veritable angel.
The cycle “The Owl” is both prologue and poetic essence. In twelve poems of equal length, Sweeney creates numerous tableaus of thoughts in which a flock of giant blue birds can appear as well as a beetle in a matchbox or a t-shirt with an owl motif. Questions are the engine of these poems. A form of speech that not only conveys something of the mixture of curiosity and skepticism that characterizes Sweeney’s writing, but also of the feeling of insecurity, or more precisely: profound insecurity, that worries the waiting speaker: “The owl had / surely sown this doubt – I had let her / become careless, now she gained self-confidence / hold. And I was back to the point / where everything was uncertain, where she wanted me to be. “
Matthew Sweeney: The Owl’s Shadow. Poems. Translated from the English by Jan Wagner. Hanser Berlin, Berlin 2021. 200 pages, 24 euros.
The owl calls into the night or leaves a few feathers as a sign. Then she withdraws again. The speaker follows their tracks without knowing exactly what is due to his imagination and what is due to the actual presence of an owl. Sweeney created the following poems in such a mixture of allusions and gaps. Little by little he creates an atmospheric network of threats in which the speaker thinks he is being followed by gangs or individuals who are looking for him in order to either crucify him or bring him to the gallows.
In these verses Sweeney succeeds in taking up motifs from the owl cycle, enriching them with new motifs and transforming everything into a structure of variations. This includes a target, various chess games or a glider that sometimes glides through a dream, sometimes lands on the neighboring roof. Again and again the scenes drift into the surreal. Just now the elevator door opens in a poem, and it is already evident that the cabin is not an ordinary one, rather it resembles a bed-like drawer, with a blanket, pillows, sheets – and a few blue lamps on the side that flash incessantly.
As serious as it may sound at times, Sweeney has pervaded his verses with relish with ironic volts. He finds the most beautiful ideas in everyday language, in idioms or cooking recipes, for example. And he manages to give even these seemingly ordinary words the greatest musical power. The way he conjures up the phrase “a CD of Baltic jazz” from the letters of a “glass of Malbec” is an art in itself.
It is not an easy task for the translation to recreate the often long sentences, the rhythmic changes, images and sound figures. Jan Wagner has always found beautiful solutions here. Especially for the hidden rhymes and assonances. Even from a powerful cohesion like “We are thrown together, all of us, by winds / that come here from far-off worlds”, he makes an even more musical “We are all swept to one another by winds / that come from far-off worlds” .
Matthew Sweeney’s poems will be missing. At the end of his volume he writes homages to his sick bed, to the slime or to the construction worker in front of the window. They are verses full of melancholy, in which there are nonetheless wondrous ideas like a mouse sandwich or a chef named “Señor Morphium”. Just as the view of the sea through a small window reminds the speaker that he is in the south, a glance at Sweeney’s luminous verses reminds of the power of poetry.