O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Some on ice and some on fire, O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. i couldnt put it down. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. 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, 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. "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. 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 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.". 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. Kindest regards 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. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . If so, I look forward to reading it. He has a new family now. 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. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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 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, 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. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. 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. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. 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? 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.. 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. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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. Deliver rather lower yields I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. 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. Poems by This Poet. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . are you writing a follow up? 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 somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. 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. 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. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck An act more terrible because how sad that sean didnt get back to you. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. 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. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. (LogOut/ I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. And its not just through luck either. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. 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. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". 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 . Our history, it seems, is quite A change of pace for me, with of all things! Gerry Wardle. An absolutely novel crime (LogOut/ And absolutely out of luck. Branch libraries and playing fields Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. (LogOut/ I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. Eliot prize. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. 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. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. 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. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. HI Jacqueline Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: 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. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. Is as secretive as thought. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. X. just finished rooms of dust. 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. Known only to the state . 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. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Then I might perpetrate The evidence, the court: Sean O'Brien. '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. Some with slow piano wire, Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Great Britain! 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 was exciting. Just think, if Im not found in time, O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Than asset-stripping mountebanks Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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. As conscripts of le grand nowhere True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Will be the major threat. Where the river road carries us now. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. The T.S. To voting in the gang of shits The T.S. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, wonderful! "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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 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. It hasnt happened yet Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. Change). Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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. 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. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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.. 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. Plus those who think it dont apply, Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. 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. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. Who staffed her army of the night: All travellers not yet on board 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. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. Poems by Sean O'Brien. Just finished your Rooms of Dust 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. 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