it’s being strangled, but if you kiss it on the lips
it will bow and back away, and you’ll smell
the delicate scent of three different gazelle
meats being grilled with fresh thyme, and these
will be served to you with a poached ostrich egg,
palm wine, and flat bread cooked in the sand,
while skilled musicians play the blues on ouds
that lead you to a luminous yellow hammock
where you’ll stretch yourself out like a corpse
to dream you’re outside, and can’t get in.
*
Five Yellow Roses
What stopped her bawling was the doorbell
ringing, and a man standing there with five
yellow roses, bulked up with green fronds
and tied in a dinky knot with olive twine.
There was no card to say who the flowers
came from. The man’s uniform was blue
with a brown insignia of a spider on his right
top pocket that she saw he kept unbuttoned.
As he waltzed down the path to the gate
the Siamese cat that frequented the garden
raised its back and hissed. The man laughed
and flounced out to his waiting white van.
Oh, the shit-faced, side-streets of life! OK,
she’d been born in Madras, in a flowery tea shop
while an albino conjurer magicked a hare
to leap from his heavily ringed brown fingers.
Five yellow roses? Enough to encourage her
to cook saffron rice, with turmeric-tinged prawns
and sautéed yellow courgettes. She didn’t play
the Ry Cooder where yellow roses say goodbye.
*
Van Gogh’s Gun
The beauty had a dragon-tattoo on her foot –
or was it a lizard? – and there were no rips
at the knees of her tight jeans. I sat there,
wondering if Van Gogh would have painted her.
I doubted it. Cypress trees were more his line,
or yellow bedrooms. But those trees quivered,
as if on a computer screen that a virus was invading
and no one could sleep in that yellow bedroom.
Oh, Vincent, as that American singer said, this
world was maybe not for you. But it was, it
was. What else was captured in those paintings
you made – and captured in a way no other
painter has done? You couldn’t stick it, though,
and now they’re putting your gun on display,
the one that ended your life – not immediately,
your pistol à broche was hardly serious enough
to kill anyone, except you. Vincent, you were 37,
and felt like you’d lived for a century, at least.
I’m not alone in wishing I’d had a drink with you
but a bullet was waiting to tattoo your chest.
*
My Life as a Painter
The three small birds my father brought me
on a plate had been shot by him a week before,
then plucked, gutted and pot-roasted (not by him
but by my grandfather), and my father sat down
opposite me, asking me to sample each, then tell
him which I preferred. One was a snipe, one a
crake, one a wood-pigeon. I tasted them all,
picked out the lead shot, and liked the pigeon.
My father laughed and said it was his least favourite.
Or maybe he claimed to enjoy all the birds equally.
I often find a wish going through me to remake myself
as a painter. Those three birds would be perfect
for my first work. I wouldn’t depict my father on
the hill with the shotgun or Rossa, the red setter,
running to collect the birds. No, I’d stay faithful
to the old concept of the still life or, in French,
nature morte. Birds on a plate, nothing else.
I might add a few colours that weren’t there.
And I’d follow up with a long, flat portrait of three
spectacularly blue-moulded loaves, all of them rye.
Contents List
11 The Prayer
12 The Hidden Oasis
13 Five Yellow Roses
14 No Map
15 The Fire Devil
16 The Parrot’s Soliloquy
17 The Nazi Gold Train
18 Iceland
19 The Hole-up
20 The Dance of the Rats
25 The Rope Ladder
27 The Hook
28 This Life
29 Nazi Dreams
30 The Lost Wine
31 Schade!
32 Dialogue with an Artist
34 Van Gogh’s Gun
35 The Blind Clairvoyant
36 A Belief in Angels
37 Nowhere Man
38 A Donkey in Dombey Street
39 My Life as a Painter
40 The Man with the Pillow
41 Beggars
42 The Coin
43 The Message
44 The Thin Brothel
45 The Red Helicopter
46 The Bunker
48 Frogman
50 Seagulls
51 Columbus on Gomera
53 The North Wind
54 Google Maps
55 Hey Jude
57 My Mother’s Wine
58 What Odds
60 Donegal
61 Mehh!
62 The Hards
63 Lisdoonvarna
64 Retribution
65 Tin Mining
66 Wiener
67 Quiz
68 These Colours
69 The Blue Cabbage
70 Mullett Lake Couplets
71 Black Squirrels
72 The Bone Rosary
73 The Bear
74 The Oarlock
75 Spooked
76 The Old Xmas Tree
77 Double Dirge
78 Owl Song
79 The Yellow Pole
Related Reviews
‘Matthew Sweeney is a hugely talented poet and this is a richly imagined and rewarding collection in which he is writing at the height of his powers.’ – David Cooke, Manchester Review [on Inquisition Lane]
'In Sweeney's poems, things happen for no reason, it seems, other than to tantalise and entertain. But the cumulative effect is to force us to consider imagination itself: its quirks, its curious dissatisfaction with the everyday...this is a wonderful collection, madcap, laconic, and provocative too.' - Bill Greenwell, Independent [on Horse Music]
'Horse Music… finds Matthew Sweeney's grim, gleeful, unrelenting fantasies in exuberant shape.' - Sean O'Brien, Independent, Books of the Year 2013
‘A poet of obsession and ritual...often elusive or mysterious...enlivened with his saturnine, uncomfortably insistent humour...Ambitious and troubling, linking Ireland to the Black Sea and madness to history, grim as death and very funny.' – Sean O’Brien, Guardian [on Black Moon]
‘Haunting fables of entrapment or imprisonment, of troubled sleep, of persecution and loneliness treated with Kafkaesque attention to detail.’ – Alan Brownjohn, Sunday Times
‘With its landscapes of desolate isolations, his is often an evocatively noirish world of contemporary angst… The persona of the poems is a troubled, self-aware consciousness taking in but never quite making sense of a contemporary world of fragments, a consciousness stretched and strained, but untouched by self-indulgence, self-pity or self-regard.’ – Eamon Grennan, Irish Times
