The Sweeney

Reading Matthew Sweeney’s A Smell of Fish. Some of it’s funny and some is black, but some I just don’t get.

It took a moment for the penny to drop, but I enjoyed 'The Houseboat', which is his take on de la Mare’s 'The Listeners'. It's probably because I recognised the reference, rather than for the poem itself. Even with the switch to the first person plural (which is inspired), it doesn’t make me care much what they wanted Dick Blackstaff for. Probably informing, drugs or some scam or other; maybe we’re supposed to think it’s Belfast rather than Camden, but there’s no clincher... The de la Mare draws on all that fairy story medievalism for atmosphere – a cheat of course, but memorable for all that. And de la Mare’s language was archaic even when he wrote it. Sweeney’s language is contemporary, no-frills (apart from the “blood-red moon”) and the clichés are situational clichés of urban violence and deprivation: houseboat, police siren, howling dog, gunshot, wrecked tanker, curry smells. I’m convincing myself that part of the point (as well as S demonstrating his skill) is in making the threat of violence mundane and unremarkable, displacing the scenario from the turreted building in the middle of a moonlit forest to a litter-strewn urban estuary. This is how some people actually live. Not a fairy story, not even (despite/because of those clichés) a TV copshow, just filthy life.

And how uneasily those de la Marian echoes and anapaests sit:
“But we heard no sound from the cabin,/ no whisper or muffled step” ...
“And these words rang over the water”...
as if he can’t resist them, though he deflates them quickly with a rhythmical challenge. He couldn't leave them long - they would carry you away.

You can imagine him knocking at a houseboat and listening to the quality of the silence and thinking of 'The Listeners', as anyone would who's ever collected door-to-door for Red Cross. And then wanting to do a contemporary version of what is an edgy encounter, or non-encounter. But the curry and police siren etc have a Z-Cars-ish feeling about them, ie. would have been great in the 60s, but feel shopworn now. Is he doing a double send-up? I don't think so; I discovered later he's a huge admirer of de la Mare and has edited the new Faber Selected.

Sweeney likes to operate in what he calls the weird zone: where reality’s skewed but things still have a crazy logic about them. In 'The Zookeeper's Dilemma', Riesfeldt’s constipated elephant is a weird concept, and the ending is OTT, but it’s not irrational.