Ranging from the sinister to the blackly comic, the combination of much published Irish poet Matthew Sweeney and prize-winning local poet Mike Smith provided the Poetry Doubles audience with a memorable evening.
Matthew Sweeney, laconic but completely arresting as a reader, drew largely on his new collection “Black Moon”, written in the aftermath of two years spent living in
Sweeney has been aptly described as “one of our finest poets of the unconscious”, and many of his poems strike a disturbing note, a sense of unnamed individuals coping after unexplained catastrophe, war and devastation. The poem “Underground”, about a man living “in a hole in the ground,/down a ladder, in the bottom room” perturbs because much of it is about the life the man has made for himself, small civilisations – he makes wine from chestnut and elm-root, gathers mushrooms at first light – belied by an abiding fear – the other rooms are usually empty “though sometimes strangers stayed - /then he’d know to remain underground”.
Mike, an increasingly well-known poet in his home county of Cumbria, opened by reading “Mechanics”, a rant on the obsession of writing – “He’s got that bloody poem stripped/down again”, and then entertained the audience by the first use of a prop in this Poetry Doubles series – the donning of a flat cap for a digression into Cumbrian dialect, undercut by the information he himself is actually from the Midlands. Later he read his prizewinning poem “Ullswater Requiem”, inspired by the death by drowning of three boys in Ullswater, a moving and serious piece of work .
The next Poetry Doubles features Gerry Stewart and Andrew Forster on Monday 8 October at the Robert Burns Centre Film Theatre,
