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. Great Britain! 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. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Some on ice and some on fire, 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. 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. 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. 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. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. "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. Gerry Wardle. are you writing a follow up? Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. Than asset-stripping mountebanks (LogOut/ "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. 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. All travellers not yet on board The T.S. 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. Rewritten. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? Just think, if Im not found in time, He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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. Is as secretive as thought. 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. Change). document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Who staffed her army of the night: My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. An absolutely novel crime 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.. 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. Sean O'Brien. 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. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. 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. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. If so, I look forward to reading it. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. The evidence, the court: It was exciting. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! 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. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, 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.". Plus those who think it dont apply, Deliver rather lower yields '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. 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. HI Jacqueline 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. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. An act more terrible because X. just finished rooms of dust. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Poems by Sean O'Brien. Strange: no one nowadays admits Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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. 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.. As conscripts of le grand nowhere I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. For in our time the future tense Eliot prize. 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. Our history, it seems, is quite To voting in the gang of shits In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. i couldnt put it down. 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, Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. You'd think that gardeners, at least, could see this as a blessing, but there's been all kinds of horticultural problems as a result of waterlogging. (LogOut/ 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, A change of pace for me, with of all things! It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Known only to the state . Where the river road carries us now. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. The T.S. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. a book of poetry. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. wonderful! Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. 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. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. On Dublin Forums your kind comments managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments such... 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