And its not just through luck either. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. (LogOut/ 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . The evil Ive committed Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. Than asset-stripping mountebanks 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. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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. 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. 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. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. 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. And absolutely out of luck. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire 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. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. An act more terrible because It hasnt happened yet Change). 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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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. Kindest regards He has a new family now. Just think, if Im not found in time, I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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 . Start your Independent Premium subscription today. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. wonderful! 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 How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. "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. (LogOut/ Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. For in our time the future tense 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, I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! 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. As conscripts of le grand nowhere 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. 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. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. 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'. 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.. 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. 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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. The T.S. Just finished your Rooms of Dust And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Great Britain! Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck 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. 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.. 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. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Some with slow piano wire, Strange: no one nowadays admits #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. 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. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Known only to the state . 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. 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. It was exciting. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. 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. Will be the major threat. A change of pace for me, with of all things! Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. Some on ice and some on fire, 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. The Calm. An absolutely novel crime My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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, 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. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. i couldnt put it down. Thank you for opportunity to comment. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? are you writing a follow up? Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. The evidence, the court: 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. 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, '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. Our history, it seems, is quite 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. But also written with great wit and warmth ( LogOut/ Thank you for sharing your experiences of dark. Logout/ Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times, if you out. In London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull, which built! 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