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, Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". 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. Poems by This Poet. Plus those who think it dont apply, Kindest regards 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. HI Jacqueline "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. I absolutely loved your book Sarah it teased out memories of my emotions, I felt would drown me, when I was a child and I was bitterly disappointed you did not manage to bring a comforting and satisfying conclusion to your heartache. Thank you for opportunity to comment. Poems by Sean O'Brien. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Rewritten. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? It was exciting. It hasnt happened yet Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. Some on ice and some on fire, 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 couldnt put it down. 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, The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. 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. Just finished your Rooms of Dust 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, Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". (LogOut/ I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. are you writing a follow up? Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. With so many childhood memories touched by water, O'Brien began to compile a collection, little knowing it would end up being published in a year that saw such an abundance of rain. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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. Some with slow piano wire, (LogOut/ I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! 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.. 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. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Who staffed her army of the night: The evil Ive committed 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. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. 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. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Here, OBrien charts a psycho-geographic journey through the English countryside and the haunted precincts of London, mapping a labyrinth of love, madness and lost history. 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. The Calm. 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. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, The evidence, the court: It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. a book of poetry. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. The T.S. To voting in the gang of shits 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. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. 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. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . A change of pace for me, with of all things! I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? 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 . "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. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Sean O'Brien. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. 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. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. 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. 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.". And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. Deliver rather lower yields For in our time the future tense He was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, and studied as a postgraduate at the universities of Birmingham, Hull and Leeds, where he gained a Postgraduate Certificate in Education. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. Gerry Wardle. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Is as secretive as thought. 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 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. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. 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'. 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. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. Will be the major threat. All travellers not yet on board wonderful! 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. Great Britain! Branch libraries and playing fields Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. An act more terrible because 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.. X. just finished rooms of dust. 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