PoetryMatthew Sweeney's eighth collection begins with a "zero hour" poem set in a nameless city suffering unspoken catastrophe. The modern world of high-speed travel and mass consumption, of airports and supermarkets, is grinding to a halt.
The bicycle gives way to the horse, the doctor totes a rifle on his way to work, and provisions are running short ("The first riots/ are raging as I write"). With the familiar props of contemporary life fast vanishing, memories are all that remind us how to live. But as the title suggests, Sweeney's dismal, disorientated future is also a version of now. Confronting the zero ground of our current nightmares, Sweeney's asks how much - or how little - it takes to keep going.
Sweeney keeps returning to the thought of how much we have to negate in our effort to be ourselves, to stay alive. Throughout Sanctuary, characters inhabit an attenuated world, a universe of subtractions. His surreal fables focus on the pared down, curtailed life, and the methods we choose to shield it from further diminution. Even the arrival of electricity at a Donegal farmhouse in 1954 is experienced as a lessening - for the new plant requires feeding. But can we shore up our identity simply by denying the outer world? The "Sanctuary" of the title poem is a shelter built upon lies, a haven made from fears of a threatening outside. The narrator's alarmist picture of comfort under siege turns out to be the stage-setting for a seduction. The real denials and deceptions, it seems, are occurring within.
It's this flaunting of fraud which saves Sweeney from the sentimentalism of so many of the current practitioners of "poems for our times". That, and the skilled manipulation of syntax and voice which he achieves in his best work. 'Urine Therapy', for example, charts a world of experience coming into being through negation. The refusal of the alien, the recycling of body fluids, creates taste itself:
No, he would never let a taste and a smell beat him,
and soon the variants in both led him to nudge
his diet to the bolder peripheries - curries, garlic,
asparagus, of course, the lemon grass and rotted shrimp
of Thailand, sashimi, chilli and basil, cabbage -
and along with the assortment of freshly squeezed juices
he slipped in the odd whisky or brandy night-cap
to give the slightest of frissons to that first sip
the following morning, and bring a smile to the face
behind which all the illnesses he was ruling out
were being listed . . .
Sweeney's imagination is fascinated by all the ways we say no to experience, and how those denials build an enigmatic and above all deeply personal architecture around us. In contrast, Colette Bryce is always saying yes, always responding. Her world is a tissue of signs to be read and interpreted. Whether it's the tally of deaths chalked up in Derry town centre during the hunger strikes, the harps and royal heads on the jumble of coins her father brings home from the bar, or the message silently mouthed by a goldfish, the poet's task is to decipher and clarify. Charmed by and wary of the miraculous in almost equal measure, she takes her soundings on the borderline between trickery, technology and magic, as when a mobile phone connects by accident but doesn't answer -
Hello, I said. Hello . . . hello?
and heard from underneath your clothes
a sound like breakers folding into foam
on shifting stones,
on a stretch of shingle . . .
Like a stethoscoped doctor listening in, Bryce diagnoses from afar, conjures intimacy out of distance.
The Full Indian Rope Trick opens with a sequence of poems evoking Bryce's youth in Derry, their technique often recalling Medbh McGuckian's early poised and sexy-strange lyrics. The "rope trick" apparently marks the moment of her departure, her dissolution into "thin air" up "a braid/ eighteen summers long".
She has left behind the strangled messages speaking of violence and division, but she has carried with her a habit of listening hard for the mysterious, and of exploring in rhyme and rhythm what Elizabeth Bishop once called "the surrealism of everyday life".
Clair Wills is Reader in Modern Poetry at Queen Mary, University of London. She is completing a study of Irish writing during the second World War
Sanctuary By Matthew Sweeney Jonathan Cape, 54pp. £8
The Full Indian Rope Trick By Colette Bryce Picador, 48pp. £8.99