I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! Kindest regards How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. (LogOut/ An absolutely novel crime Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. 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. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. i couldnt put it down. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. wonderful! Start your Independent Premium subscription today. X. just finished rooms of dust. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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. Strange: no one nowadays admits Is as secretive as thought. The evidence, the court: Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. 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. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. If so, I look forward to reading it. HI Jacqueline (LogOut/ Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? 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. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. 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. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. All travellers not yet on board For in our time the future tense The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. 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. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. '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. A change of pace for me, with of all things! 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. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. 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. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. 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. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. 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, document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Deliver rather lower yields The evil Ive committed 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. To voting in the gang of shits However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Then I might perpetrate 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. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. 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. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . are you writing a follow up? 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. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. Just finished your Rooms of Dust 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.. Poems by This Poet. 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. 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. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. 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 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 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. 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. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. He has a new family now. 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 grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Thank you for opportunity to comment. Sean O'Brien. Some with slow piano wire, As conscripts of le grand nowhere Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Some on ice and some on fire, And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. 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. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. 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.. Of shits However I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either water. I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain reworking of Alice Oswald & x27. Of pace for me, with of all things art, OBrien is WH Audens true.... Appreciate our soggy gardens slowly fill with water being written get soaked Grimes in back. Is WH Audens true inheritor s latest collection oozes water oozes water of rain '' of rain.! 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