Full Description
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.
Contents
11 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
