The title poem of Matthew Sweeney's seventh collection tells of the consternation among the animal and human inhabitants of an inland valley when their locality is invaded by a smell of fish. Sweeney's poems are almost all narratives rather than lyric distillations of emotion. The stories they tell, however, are incomplete, their omission of crucial details leaving the reader with a sense of disturbance, of something "fishy" going on. Many pieces begin as low-key transcriptions of everyday events only to deepen quietly into mystery. A perfume salesman displays his wares to a flat-dweller, unaware that his interlocutor has a loaded gun which he plans to use one day soon on a casual caller ("Our Resident"). A busy Londoner receives an angry, menacingly well-informed phone call in German ("Long Distance"). Some of these mysteries have exotic settings, for instance "Thaw":
When they melted the
huge icicle a dodo
fell onto the floor.
This hatches its surprise in the final line in the way exercises in haiku are supposed to, but rarely manage. "Thaw" provides a miniature instance of Sweeney's characteristic puzzlingness. Who are "they"? Why has the icicle been so deliberately melted, and why has this activity taken place indoors?
That dodo is typical of Sweeney's subject matter in representing an unaccountable visitation from another world. Elsewhere in the book a mysterious swimmer is glimpsed far out to sea before disappearing, a squadron of second World War fighter planes buzzes contemporary London, a herd of wild horses appears out of nowhere to stampede through a township and then vanishes into the hills, and the Pope, in sunglasses and a black Armani suit, emerges from Castel Gandolfo for a snifter of vodka at a tourist bar. "The Tombs", a touching fantasy about the momentary resurrection of the speaker's dead relatives, suggests that all the irruptions, visitations and strange happenings in the book may be metaphors for death, which defamiliarises everything.
Though Sweeney's language makes a virtue of directness, his poems are ghosted by wisps and scraps of other texts: Browning, Arnold, De La Mare and even the Kinks lurk in the verbal undergrowth. Half a dozen pieces acknowledge their origin in a phrase by one or other of the poet's favourite authors. Sweeney responds to Ezra Pound's advice that "a narrative is all right so long as the narrator sticks to words as simple as dog, horse, sunset" by writing a hilarious account of an insomniac's rage at a dog who begins to bark at sunset, frightening the innkeeper's horse and setting up an all night chorus of animals.
The insomniac of "Animals", like many of the speakers and characters in A Smell of Fish, is "not quite right". The author shares a name with the least "right" of all poets and poetic protagonists, the frenzied Suibhne.
Seamus Heaney has made cheerful mileage out of the chime between his own name and that of the deranged bird-king of Dal Araidhe. Sweeney's patronym qualifies him to go one better. "Sweeney", the funniest and perhaps the most brilliant poem in the book, modernises the bird-king as the hypochondriacal, impractical alter ego of his Donegal namesake. The early symptoms of his avian transformation are put down to neurosis ("those feathers pushing through my pores/were psychosomatic") until he scratches his wife with his claws as his kisses turn to pecks. Thrown out of the house, and "cursed" for being no good at DIY, he sits bewildered and ignored on a tree in his suburban garden. The bird-bard's first attempt at flight is also his last: he crashes suicidally into the wall of the house on seeing his still all too human wife come home with a man. Delightful in its shrewdness and lightness of touch, "Sweeney" may be described as a comic poem, yet it is informed throughout by the quiet desperation and sense of estrangement which marks almost all the writing in this eerie, discommoding, consistently interesting volume.
Patrick Crotty lectures in English at St Patrick's College, Drumcondra in Dublin.