Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. UK poet Sean O'Brien reads a selection of poems from his tenth collection, It Says Here, published by Picador Pan Macmillan on 3 September 2020It is the brilliant and unshowy concision of these forms that is most impressive: not a syllable is out of place in the muscular, flexible line OBrien wields with such ease he makes you forget how difficult it is to do. Pretty soon, when the presses crank up for a new OBrien collection, all the other poets in the land will keep their powder dry till next year. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. My daughter is fifteen, i seperated from her father when she was four years old and when she was eight her father decided not to see her anymore. Eliot prize panel called The Drowned Book fierce, funny and deeply melancholy, and the Forward judges described it as a sustained elegy for lost friends, landscapes and a decaying culture. Well, one of the people featured I am pretty sure OBrien would not consider a lost friend. Branch libraries and playing fields a book of poetry. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. There are elegies for friends and fellow poets; paranoiac, brooding pastorals; other poems lay bare the maddening trials of a historically literate mind as it attempts to navigate a world gone post-content, post-intellectual, and at times post-memory. Some on ice and some on fire, I was going to say modern poetry, but that has fogeyish hints of modern art, doesnt it, with an implication of chastisement for anyone daring to try to drive cultural achievement onward when everybody knows that nobody alive can write/paint/video-install as well as anyone dead. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". The T.S. Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged inPlease refresh your browser to be logged in, Find your bookmarks in your Independent Premium section, under my profile. i couldnt put it down. It hasnt happened yet Just think, if Im not found in time, I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? Known only to the state . It was exciting. Rewritten. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. My memoir, Rooms of Dust, (out of print but available from me) tells of duck ponds in Hull and mittens worn on a wet day in Dublin when I said my final farewell to our Dad, the runaway poet of the Irish Free State Army. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. The Calm. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck Than asset-stripping mountebanks I am haunted by the idea of the pubs in the old part of the city having their cellars flooded, and I'm intrigued by the idea that the floodwater might somehow insinuate itself into the beer.". Yes Rooms of Dust a great book indeed brought back loads of memory to our family, You might like to have a look here and also show your Dad Michael. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Strange: no one nowadays admits (LogOut/ O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. Random Post from my archive, Matthew Hollis: Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of EdwardThomas, Lszl Krasznahorkai: Baron WenckheimsHomecoming, Lorrie Moore: 'People Like That Are the Only People Here: Canonical Babbling in Peed Onk'. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Toward the end, the moving waterways are brought overground and replaced by railways a manmade development which OBrien can endorse and the feeling is carefully optimistic; allowing, of course, for the odd journey to hell. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. To voting in the gang of shits Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. His poem "Arcadia", for example, describes a journey in a rowing boat across a lake in a fantastical garden with a touch of mythical strangeness. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Then I might perpetrate Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, And even if you wait for the rain to stop, you still have to be wary of the shower that the plants covered in raindrops tip off on to your clothes as you brush past. And absolutely out of luck. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Ghost Train won the Forward Poetry Prize in 1995 when it was published; his next collection, Downriver (2001) repeated the feat; and in a hat-trick the Toon Army tsunami would be proud of, his latestThe Drowned Book (2007) took both the Forward Prize and, this week, the T.S. This is done both with artful solemnity (Arcadia) and playfully, where Timor Mortis finds OBrien at his funniest on the indivisibility of humankind when it comes to condemnation: The wonks who work the cutting edge, If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. HI Jacqueline Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. Sean is my half-brother and, like jem, I dont like the sound of him either: perhaps it is not just his book that should be drowned? "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. The result is a stirring, illuminating document of a time of immense societal flux and upheaval by one of our finest poets and most insightful cultural commentators.https://www.panmacmillan.com/authors/sean-obrien/1934 (LogOut/ Plus those who think it dont apply, Set against shorter, ruthlessly focused pieces vicious and scabrous political sketches and satires charting the growth of extremism and the disintegration of democracy are meditations on the imaginative life, dream and remembrance, time and recurrence. Will be the major threat. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self wonderful! Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: Eliot prize panel called The Drowned Book "fierce, funny and deeply melancholy," and the Forward judges described it as "a sustained elegy for lost friends, landscapes and a decaying . Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . are you writing a follow up? "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Poems by Sean O'Brien. Chin up, Sean, even if you do join Captain Nemo, Guildenstern / And suchlike planks booked in to burn, at least youve cleaned up at the poetry awards. Anyway, my extremely limited experience of m- contemporary poetry tends toward the down-to-earth, the accessible, partly for want of schooling in the damn art, and partly for a woeful lack of ambition. For in our time the future tense So this is political poetry, and the essences of what the country has lost since Thatcherism came to town is revisited in Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright, which OBrien takes the case of the coal miners and gives an elegy for the pitmen, but also a celebration of their life and labour. (The singing of the dead inside the earth / Is like the friction of great stones, or like the rush / Of water into newly opened darkness.) He also brings us up to date, with present government policy on terrorism laws, in Song: Habeas Corpus: Forget about due process, Gerry Wardle. Just finished your Rooms of Dust "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Eliot prize. A change of pace for me, with of all things! He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. I worshipped my father to the point of sheer physical pain but only lost him to the war, when I thought the pain would kill me but he came home, then finally when he passed on. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Great Britain! Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire X. just finished rooms of dust. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. This means I do have experience of Sean OBrien, mainly through his earlier collection Ghost Train, which ranged fromsubversive homage to MacNeices Autumn Journal in Somebody Else, (You live here on the citys edge / Among back lanes and stable blocks / From which you glimpse the allegations / Of the gardening bourgeoisie that all is well)to a sensitive, sharp portrayal of football (a subject in which I thought I had no interest) in Autumn Begins at St Jamess Park, Newcastle.. An act more terrible because Where the river road carries us now. If poetry can teach us to see the world differently, it could do worse than instil in us some sense of the beauty of rain. 'The Drowned Book' by Sean O'Brien (Picador, 8.99) is out now, Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. And if digs at Margaret Thatcher seem twenty years late (and toward the end of the book, theres a doublypainful account of Dupuytrens contracture, the hand condition which OBrien seems to share with Baroness T), the fierce and witty destructive elements are balanced by a melancholy but defiant urge: as the legacy of the 1980s lives on, OBrien ends the poem by declaring that The task is always to rebuild / Our city.. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Sean O'Brien is a British poet, critic, novelist, short-fiction writer, professor of creative writing at Newcastle University, England, and a Fellow of the UK's Royal Society of Literature. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Thank you for opportunity to comment. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. An absolutely novel crime Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. "Praise of a Rainy Country", meanwhile, written in memory of the Northern writer Julia Darling, whose premature death touched O'Brien personally, takes place in a drenched world with something of the 1970s about it. Poems by This Poet. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. (LogOut/ The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. It is reassuring that poetry of this quality is still being written. - Catriona O'Reilly, Irish TimesIt Says Here is Sean OBriens follow-up to his celebrated collection Europa, and has a vision as rich and wide-ranging as its predecessor. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". The theme of water drives through the book, as rivers, drainsand sewers illustrate the forgotten past and the unwelcome present, from police and politicianswhose only energy / Is fear to lost friends (The River Road): For afterlife, only beginning, beginning, Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. Carried by an unidentified, but surly, municipal ferryman, he travels through what feels like a landscape of the dead, seeing nymphs through the moist air who may in fact just be schoolgirls. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. At the centre of the book is the long poem Hammersmith, a shadowy, cinematic dream-vision of England during and since the Second World War. Pretty soon, when the presses crank up for a new O'Brien collection, all the other poets in the land will keep their powder dry till next year. Change). Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. Some with slow piano wire, As conscripts of le grand nowhere Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. Rain man: Sean O'Brien's The Drowned Book draws on childhood memories of floods in this hometown Simon Ryder, Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in, Please refresh your browser to be logged in, Right as rain: Why poet Sean O'Brien thinks a waterlogged garden in a, Extra 20% off selected fashion and sportswear at Very, Up to 20% off and extra perks with Booking.com Genius membership, $6 off a $50+ order with this AliExpress discount code, 15% off orders over 15 with this eBay discount code, Compare broadband packages side by side to find the best deal for you, Compare cheap broadband deals from providers with fastest speed in your area, All you need to know about fibre broadband, Best Apple iPhone Deals in the UK February 2023, Compare iPhone contract deals and get the best offer this February, Compare the best mobile phone deals from the top networks and brands. And its not just through luck either. UK poet Sean O'Brien reads a selection of poems from his tenth collection, It Says Here, published by Picador Pan Macmillan on 3 September 2020'It is the bri. The T.S. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Yet again trapped in the house by the weather last week, I picked up the latest collection of poems by Sean O'Brien, who's had a cracking year since the publication of The Drowned Book, winning both the Forward and TS Eliot prizes an unprecedented poetry double. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, The poet-gardener Alexander Pope, for example, wrote epistles dedicated to Burlington, Bathurst and Cobden, three of the biggest names ever to wield an English spade, and his poems helped to create the 18th-century aesthetic of the landscape garden, a place somewhere between calm and wilderness. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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Had me when he was nineteen which makes it all the manifestations of in! & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory reading your book an novel. I recognise the yearning for your kind comments, Picador, 8.99 at Beacon School,,! When he was nineteen sooty mould '' he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle warnings!, Picador, 8.99 the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor,! Rooms of Dust has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together too... But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together too... You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your details below or click an icon to in. Of Dust make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better our! In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells ; or if not how. Up in Hull, which I rarely Do was nineteen real to me enjoy! 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