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Shadow 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.
About the author
Matthew Sweeney (1952-2018) was born in Lifford, Co. Donegal, Ireland. He moved to London in 1973 and studied at the Polytechnic of North London and the University of Freiburg. After living in Berlin and Timisoara for some years, he returned to Ireland and settled in Cork. He died in August 2018 from motor neurone disease. His poetry collections include A Dream of Maps (Raven Arts Press, 1981), A Round House (Raven Arts Press, 1983), The Lame Waltzer (Raven Arts Press, 1985), Blue Shoes (Secker & Warburg, 1989), Cacti (Secker & Warburg, 1992), The Bridal Suite (Jonathan Cape, 1997) and A Smell of Fish (Jonathan Cape, 2000), Selected Poems (Jonathan Cape, 2002), Sanctuary (Jonathan Cape, 2004), Black Moon (Jonathan Cape, 2007), The Night Post: A Selection (Salt, 2010); and four from Bloodaxe, Horse Music (2013), Inquisition Lane (2015), My Life as a Painter (2018) and the posthumously published Shadow of an Owl (2020). Black Moon was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Horse Music won the inaugural Pigott Poetry Prize in association with Listowel Writers' Week, and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. He also published editions of selected poems in Canada (Picnic on Ice, Vehicule Press, 2002) and and two translated by Jan Wagner in Germany, Rosa Milch (Berlin Verlag, 2008) and Hund und Mond (Hanser Berlin, 2017). He won a Cholmondeley Award in 1987 and an Arts Council Writers' Award in 1999. He also published poetry for children, with collections including The Flying Spring Onion (1992), Fatso in the Red Suit (1995) and Up on the Roof: New and Selected Poems (2001). His novels for children include The Snow Vulture (1992) and Fox (2002). He edited The New Faber Book of Children's Poems (2003) and Walter De la Mare: Poems (2006) for Faber; co-edited Emergency Kit: Poems for Strange Times (Faber, 1996) with Jo Shapcott; and co-wrote Writing Poetry (Teach Yourself series, Hodder, 1997) and the comic novel Death Comes for the Poets (Muswell Press, 2012) with John Hartley Williams. Matthew Sweeney held residencies at the University of East Anglia and the South Bank Centre in London, and was Poet in Residence at the National Library for the Blind as part of the Poetry Places scheme run by the Poetry Society in London. He was writer-in-residence at University College Cork in 2012-13, and was a member of Aosdána.
Summary
Matthew Sweeney’s final collection brings together poems written during a year of debilitating illness before his death from Motor Neuron Disease in 2018. All his verve and spiky humour are here, following, as always, unnerving dream logic. But the dream is now a nightmare and the catastrophe, impending in all his earlier poems, has come to pass.
