Description
Book SynopsisShadow of the Owl is Matthew Sweeney's final collection, bringing together the poems he wrote during a year of debilitating illness. He died from Motor Neuron Disease in 2018 shortly after publishing My Life as a Painter, written before he became ill, but – like all his previous collections – preparation for this final work. In a sequence of dark fables, a hapless figure is hounded by a procession of invisible enemies who want him dead. These jokers – kidnappers, assassins, liars all – have many methods at their disposal, from crucifixion or hanging to bombing or mauling by crocodile… A menacing owl comes to the garden each night for twelve nights, but refuses to deliver its devastating news. All of Sweeney’s verve and spiky humour are present in these last poems, following, 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. The man on the run needs to reach new heights of ingenuity, if he is to escape, repeatedly, the most horrible of deaths. The poet is writing for his life. For more than forty years Matthew Sweeney sought to capture, in poetry, the life of a body menaced and condemned to wander in a 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 imbued with a lyrical beauty and great sadness at leaving that world just as the spirit was burning as brightly as ever.
Trade ReviewMatthew had the courage of his own idiosyncratic sensibility; nobody now writing has Matthew’s gift for employing language and images of fable to such a dark and unsettling effect, ringing the changes from tenderness to dark comedy with such power and verve. -- Theo Dorgan * The Irish Times *
One of the most adventurous, life-enhancing and distinctive poets of his gifted generation. -- Bill Swainson * The Guardian *
Matthew Sweeney has been a singular presence in Irish poetry for decades, and the much-travelled, Donegal-born poet had finished two reassuringly characteristic new books before his death in August. One of them, My Life as a Painter, includes many new signature poems, tales whose surprising images suddenly gather additional narrative force. -- John McAuliffe * The Irish Times *
Table of Contents11 Foreword by Mary Noonan The owl 17 1–12 The sequence 31 The Albatross 32 The Director 33 The Target 34 The Assassins 35 The Ancient Crane 36 The Exit 37 Crocodile 38 The Chess Match 39 The Angel 40 The Glider 41 Sweet Song 42 Crucifixion 43 Shadow of the Owl 44 The New Lighthouse 45 The Portrait Painter 46 The Gallows 47 Butterflies 48 An Invitation to Dinner 49 Stench 50 The Drawer 52 The Tube 53 The Sick Bed 54 Plum Saké Other poems 59 Dubrovnik 60 The Rain 61 The Juggler 63 Onions 64 Ballycotton 65 The Log Cabin 66 Returning to a Borrowed House 67 The Ice Cream Van 68 The Hedgehog 70 Pizza à Sète 72 The Sleeping Woman 73 Taxi à Sète 74 Three Heads 76 Translating Paul Valéry 78 The Port 79 Fernfeld 80 What a True Fan Has to Do 81 The Lamppost, Plaza Mayor, Chinchón 82 Monsieur Lapin 83 Trauma 84 The Snow 85 The Grinners 86 The Bathroom Devils 87 The Heron 88 Tennis 89 The Danube Book 90 The Descent into Limbo 91 No-Man’s-Land 93 The Mountebank Last poems 97 Tree Trunks 98 Coloured Hair in the Garage 99 The Builder’s Singing 100 Hook Head 101 Homage 102 Phlegm 103 Mouse Sandwich
