Matthew Sweeney
Born: October 6th, 1952
Died: August 5th, 2018
Poet Matthew Sweeney, who has died at the age of 65, was a prolific writer of poetry for adults and children, an editor of poetry anthologies and a generous mentor to younger poets both in Ireland and abroad.
Donegal-born Sweeney was, in many ways, more a European poet than an Irish poet, having spent years living in London, Berlin and Timisoara, Romania, before settling in Cork city in 2008. Apart from Seamus Heaney, he was the most widely translated Irish poet of his generation. His poetry was translated into German, Dutch, Latvian, Slovakian, Romanian and Mexican Spanish. He was a member of Aosdána, the State-organisation that honours those with outstanding contributions to the creative arts.
Born in Lifford, he grew up in Ballyliffin on the north-western tip of Donegal’s Inishowen peninsula. One of four children and a solitary child, Sweeney attended the local national school where his father was headmaster. He often said that he got his love of poetry from his father. He read voraciously as a child and his aunt, Nell, the local librarian, gave him the keys to the library to satisfy his reading needs.
Boarding school
Sweeney started writing poetry when he was at boarding school in Gormanston College, Co Meath. In interviews, he said that he was bullied badly while there and writing poetry made it easier for him. When he showed his poems to his English teacher, he was told that “poetry was something one grows out of”. After his Leaving Certificate, Sweeney went to University College Dublin to study chemical engineering which he abandoned after two years.
He then went to London where his poetry started to come back to him. Unable to attend a university in London with his Irish Leaving Certificate, Sweeney enrolled to study English and German in the Polytechnic of North London. He spent an Erasmus year at the University of Freiburg and graduated in 1978.
He met Rosemary Barber in 1972 and they married in 1979. Their two children, Nico and Malvin, grew up in a London home often filled with friends entertained by Sweeney’s tales, favourite music and excellent cooking.
The couple separated in the early 2000s, after which time Sweeney lived for several years in both Berlin and Romania. He often cited the writings of Franz Kafka as his greatest influence. The poets Georg Trakl, Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, German Romantic artists and 19th-century French poets were among his many sources of inspiration.
Poetic style
In his writing, Sweeney eschewed the popular poetry forms, opting instead for a vivid narrative style filled with tragic-comedic and absurdist elements. When asked to describe his poetic style at an event marking the publication of Inquisition Lane (Bloodaxe, 2015), the 11th of twelve published collections of his poems, Sweeney said, "I distrust the poetic. German writers showed me how to find the poetic in the non-poetic." Non-conformist and witty, he dedicated his whole life to the art of poetry.
Poet Theo Dorgan said: “Matthew had the courage of his own idiosyncratic sensibility; nobody now writing has Matthew’s gift for employing language and images of fable to such a dark and unsettling effect, ringing the changes from tenderness to dark comedy with such power and verve.”
Irish Times poetry editor Gerard Smith said Sweeney was "a maker of modern parables" which he called his "alternative realism" and that "the energy of his public readings matched the fiery imagination in the poems".
His collections include A Dream of Maps (Raven Arts Press, 1981), Blue Shoes (Secker & Warburg, 1989), Black Moon (Jonathan Cape, 2007) – shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and for The Irish Times Poetry Now Award – and Horse Music (Bloodaxe, 2013). His collection King of a Rainy Country, inspired by Baudelaire's posthumously published Petits Poemes en Prose, will be published by Arc in September, 2018.
Sweeney wrote two novels for children (The Snow Vulture, 1992, and Fox, 2002) and five collections of poetry for children including The Flying Spring Onion (Faber, 1992) and Fatso in the Red Suit (Faber, 1995). He was editor of the New Faber Book of Children's Verse (Faber, 2001) and the New Faber Book of Children's Poems (Faber Children's Books, 2003). With English poet John Hartley Williams, Sweeney co-authored a guide to poetry, Writing Poetry and Getting Published (Hodder, 1996) and a satirical thriller, Death Comes for the Poets (Muswell Hill Press, 2012).
Universities
Sweeney also led many workshops and held residences in various universities and arts centres where he worked his mischievous magic on students of poetry. In his last 10 years in Cork city – where he lived with his partner, Mary Noonan, an academic at University College Cork and published poet – he gave generously of his time and energy to many young poets. Latterly, he was also a big fan of contemporary European jazz music and went to jazz concerts wherever he travelled.
Sweeney's most recent collection of poems, My Life as a Painter (Bloodaxe, 2018) was launched in the Munster Literature Centre in Cork city months before his death. Although the motor neuron disease, which was diagnosed in 2017, had progressed greatly by that time, he read some poems from the collection, as did other Cork-based poets with whom he had built solid friendships over the last 10 years.
Matthew Sweeney is survived by his partner, Mary Noonan, daughter Nico, son Malvin, grandchildren Nell and Jude, brothers Paid and Damhnait, extended family and many friends in the world of poetry.