I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. 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, Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. (LogOut/ 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. Thank you for opportunity to comment. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. A change of pace for me, with of all things! 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 As conscripts of le grand nowhere And absolutely out of luck. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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. 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 . And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". i couldnt put it down. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, 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.. 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. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". It hasnt happened yet O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Eliot prize. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. If so, I look forward to reading it. 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. 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. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. 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.". Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. The T.S. 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'. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. The evidence, the court: 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. The Calm. HI Jacqueline He has a new family now. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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, Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, 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. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? 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. 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. 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. Poems by This Poet. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Our history, it seems, is quite 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. All travellers not yet on board "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Change). Will be the major threat. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. Just finished your Rooms of Dust He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Is as secretive as thought. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. 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.. 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 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. Rewritten. 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. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. 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. 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. Strange: no one nowadays admits are you writing a follow up? "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. 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. Just think, if Im not found in time, a book of poetry. 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