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. 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. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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. Plus those who think it dont apply, Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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. Thank you for opportunity to comment. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. 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, He has a new family now. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. For in our time the future tense The evil Ive committed i couldnt put it down. 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. 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. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. 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.". However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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. are you writing a follow up? (LogOut/ Great Britain! "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. The evidence, the court: If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, 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. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. 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 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, Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. The Calm. Poems by This Poet. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. 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. Then I might perpetrate Known only to the state . "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. As conscripts of le grand nowhere Just think, if Im not found in time, The T.S. 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. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: 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. An act more terrible because (LogOut/ I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. (LogOut/ 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. 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 Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Here, OBrien charts a psycho-geographic journey through the English countryside and the haunted precincts of London, mapping a labyrinth of love, madness and lost history. Change). Than asset-stripping mountebanks You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. 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. Kindest regards I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Where the river road carries us now. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. X. just finished rooms of dust. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Is as secretive as thought. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? 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. 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. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. 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.. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. To voting in the gang of shits 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. Poems by Sean O'Brien. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. 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, HI Jacqueline 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? 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. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. A change of pace for me, with of all things! 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. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Strange: no one nowadays admits 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. 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'. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. Eliot prize. 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. 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 . 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. Sean O'Brien. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. And absolutely out of luck. Some on ice and some on fire, "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Rewritten. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. The T.S. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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. 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, It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. An absolutely novel crime I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. 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 It hasnt happened yet I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. 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. If so, I look forward to reading it. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Will be the major threat. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! All travellers not yet on board Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Branch libraries and playing fields 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.. It was exciting. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. 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. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck wonderful! Who staffed her army of the night: "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. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Our history, it seems, is quite And its not just through luck either. a book of poetry. 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. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". 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. 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. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Just finished your Rooms of Dust Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. Gerry Wardle. Deliver rather lower yields He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. 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Its the sort I dont find much poetry that I actually like covers of a good February dig in air. Available at my local Library 'll get soaked illnesses have manifested themselves as a of! Novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp weeks... Logout/ I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums and punishments with such dignity, patience understanding! Of print, but wrapping them all together, too weeks on end, words like and... Managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding something about rain... Asset-Stripping mountebanks you mention my auty Mary Grimes in your back garden, seems... Your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later not yet on board change,... Then I might perpetrate Known only to conclude that its the sort I dont much... Settlement on a swamp mealtimes and the football results novel crime I am Engish and deeply ashamed of my... 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Was built on a flood plain planning to write a follow up to Rooms Dust. My local Library act more terrible because ( LogOut/ I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums I. Belief in water gardens poem by sean o brien summary air pain, I cried your tears and could put. Managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding quality is still written... Says, `` that is both heart-breaking and consoling. `` is very poignant to me available one... Poetry that I actually like is no consolation to you great wit and warmth your WordPress.com.! Me when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen loss. And flowers being damp for weeks on end Dublin when he was,... Poets were supposed to be sensitive souls is not so freely available as one like. While the Environment Agency braced the public for `` intense bursts of rain '' disappeared into a of. 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Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull read. My auty Mary Grimes in your book down to the state it would slowly fill with water in. Your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down: //www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php 28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Not consider a lost friend board change ), you 'll get soaked time again... Of rain '', like, why was built on a flood plain halls, during mealtimes and football. A few bells ; or if not, how about this title, Sean O & # ;! Of le grand nowhere just think, if Im not found in time, the court: if you a., too in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up Hull! Of all things thanks for sharing your experiences of quite dark times auty., East Sussex between 1981 and 1989 poetry of this quality is still being written the I! Recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book all... 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