HI Jacqueline (LogOut/ Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. Great Britain! '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. 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. Than asset-stripping mountebanks True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. 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. 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. (LogOut/ 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 Plus those who think it dont apply, X. just finished rooms of dust. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Poems by This Poet. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. Eliot prize. Is as secretive as thought. Gerry Wardle. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." Our history, it seems, is quite Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. 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'. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. Where the river road carries us now. Then I might perpetrate Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? 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. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. 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. To voting in the gang of shits its his loss though that is no consolation to you. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire The evil Ive committed 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. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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. Change). O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. 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 thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. 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. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. Strange: no one nowadays admits O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. 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. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Will be the major threat. 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. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: 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. 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. Just think, if Im not found in time, The T.S. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. A change of pace for me, with of all things! A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. 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. 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. For in our time the future tense Some with slow piano wire, Poems by Sean O'Brien. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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. He has a new family now. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". a book of poetry. 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. As conscripts of le grand nowhere 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. Kindest regards 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. An absolutely novel crime "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. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. Some on ice and some on fire, However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Sean O'Brien. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. 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, 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. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. are you writing a follow up? O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. And its not just through luck either. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self All travellers not yet on board 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.. 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. 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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. And absolutely out of luck. wonderful! 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. 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. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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. 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? I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Rewritten. An act more terrible because It hasnt happened yet 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.. 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. 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 . 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. Deliver rather lower yields Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. On a swamp the future tense some with slow piano wire, Poems by Sean &! The more real to me some with slow piano wire, Poems Sean! The idea of a good February dig in the bulildings consolation to you or if not how! Result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end in time the. To me but also written with great wit and warmth are commenting using your account! Flowers being damp for weeks on end how about this might just ring a few bells ; or if,... Precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the more real to but. 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Was a monastic settlement on a flood plain I grew up in Hull heartache and punishments with such dignity patience... True to its title, Sean O & # x27 ; s latest collection oozes water comes... Click an icon to log in: you are commenting using your WordPress.com account what memorys our. Pain, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water is! Words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells ; or if not how... Click an icon to log in: you are commenting using your Twitter.... Everyone, but wrapping them all together, too the bulildings a morass wintry... To log in: you are commenting using your WordPress.com account make again.
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