Poetry Doubles Review: Matthew Sweeney and Mike Smith

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 Romania. He described the almost unbearable heat of a Romanian summer, and his own dislocation in the poem “The Sweatmark” – where the poet discovers his t-shirt has a sweatmark that describes precisely the map of his native Ireland – “what did this mean,/ if anything? He got sweatmarks/ all these days, but never a map before./He wondered should he phone home.”

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, Dumfries at 7pm. Tickets cost £7/£5 and are available from Dumfries & Galloway Arts Association 01387 253383 or andrew@dgaa.net.

Poetry Doubles Review Jen Hadfield and Vivien Jones

This week’s Poetry Doubles welcomed prize-winning poet Jen Hadfield and the increasingly well-known Vivien Jones.

Vivien, who lives in Powfoot, has just become a winner in the Sedburgh Short Stories competition, and is a performer in Making Waves with Jackie Galley. She also has the distinction of having performed in Dumfries & Galloway’s very first Poetry Doubles series four years ago. Her humorous, almost misleadingly gentle performance was obviously appreciated by the audience, who were then provoked to laughter by unexpected mischievousness –
“gorse is a feast, a binge/ a prick of a shrub”.

She read from the performance Making Waves, and also as yet unpublished work from a trip to Italy, where she visited the house of Isabella d’Este, the first buyer of viols in the renaissance period –

“I touched the walls as if the purr/ of Isabella’s viols might be there”.

Jen Hadfield, described by Tom Leonard as “a whole and committed poet”, proved to be an engaging performer. Juggling sheaves of paper, chuckling with the audience, she read from her forthcoming book, “Nigh No Place”, work based around 15 months spent in Canada, and then her return to home in Shetland. She confided her struggles with writer’s block in Canada, explored in the poem “Still Life With The Very Devil”. She also elicited some audience participation in her poem “Paternoster”, about flying to Canada, knowing that in the hold stood six well-drugged thoroughbred racehorses. “Paternoster” is written as a kind of prayer, ending wisely “May the horse never wake that stands in mid-air”, duly repeated by a very entertained audience as a liturgical response.

Back in Shetland again, Jen’s poems described a land which hides itself behind fogs, plays hard to get – a persona encapsulated in the skerryman who figures in the poems collected in “Almanacs”. Her poems explore weather and the landscape –

“Haar climbs the Voe/ and fills the valley’s pitcher./ Fence posts barble it./ The red and umber mosses/ drink it in.”