Poet Sweeney back in the saddle after six-year wait

A LULL in poet Matthew Sweeney’s writing used to plunge him into despair.

“When I didn’t write, I’d panic. I was like, ‘Oh my God. It’s gone. It’s gone’.” He has learned the value of down-times, that fallow is potential for renewal. Over the past decade, the gaps between collections has been widening. In the six years between his latest collection, Horse Music, and his last, Black Moon, he has become more philosophical.

“After the last book, I couldn’t find my way for a while, and that can often means that you’re moving on to something else and you don’t quite know where you’re moving on to,” he says. “This book took a bit longer to get going and that’s good for a book, to live with it a bit longer.

“I remember an English poet sending me an email when I was worried about this, about a year after my last book, and he said: ‘Look, don’t be in so much of a hurry. There seems to be a pressure to come up with a new book every three years. Stop. Just hold it.’ And then, when he got hold of the book about a week ago, he sent me an email saying: ‘This book has really benefited from the long wait’.”

The long wait has startled Sweeney’s routine. “Normally, when I publish a book, I don’t write. Normally, there’s a period of, maybe, anything up to a year where nothing comes out, or nothing that’s any way interesting, and, this time, I’m well on my way to another book. It’s just like the momentum has decided it’s not to stop. So I have a load of new poems,” he says.

A metaphor from horse racing: loosening the reins induces the horse to bolt. Seagulls and crows have long been part of Sweeney’s poetic landscape, but in Horse Music the equine is to the fore.

“I love the look of horses. When I see horses in a field, I think they’re the most beautiful animals. And there are some great poems about horses. Ted Hughes has a lovely early poem about horses and Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, has as well.

“You see the horses as mythical and real, at the same time. You know cows are lovely creatures, but you couldn’t say that about them.

“The horse is so special. And then there’s the whole myth of the centaur, the creature that’s half-man half-horse, which is why, in this book, some of my horses do magical things.”

In the late paintings of Jack B Yeats, Sweeney sees a personification of these magical horses and an image of Yeats adorns the cover of Horse Music.

“Every time I go to Dublin, I spend about an hour with Yeats’s paintings in the National Gallery. And, again, he goes beyond legendary. Those horses are magic horses; there’s something very, very special about them,” he says.

Was Sweeney around horses as a child? “No. I grew up in Donegal. You don’t have to go far in County Cork to see beautiful racehorses in the fields. Donegal is the only county in Ireland without a racetrack. Can you believe that?

“The only county in the whole of Ireland without a racetrack. So I couldn’t have grown up in a less horsey place,” he says.

*Horse Music (Bloodaxe Books) will be launched at 4pm today in the Farmgate Café, upstairs in the English Market, Cork.