how sad that sean didnt get back to you. Kindest regards 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. 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. (LogOut/ "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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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.. wonderful! And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. Poems by Sean O'Brien. As conscripts of le grand nowhere 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. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. 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, 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.". It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. 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. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? If so, I look forward to reading it. 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. The T.S. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. 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 . 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. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. i couldnt put it down. 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. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Is as secretive as thought. 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. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. (LogOut/ It hasnt happened yet Known only to the state . I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Eliot prize. Where the river road carries us now. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Sean O'Brien. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . Thank you for opportunity to comment. Great Britain! True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. 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 Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? 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.. 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. Who staffed her army of the night: "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. 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. Rewritten. 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe 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. Deliver rather lower yields 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'. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, 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. Some with slow piano wire, 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. 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. Then I might perpetrate Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. Just think, if Im not found in time, He has a new family now. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. The evidence, the court: Plus those who think it dont apply, Just finished your Rooms of Dust Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. 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. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire 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. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? HI Jacqueline 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. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. All travellers not yet on board Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. And absolutely out of luck. 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. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". The Calm. (LogOut/ 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. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." Some on ice and some on fire, 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. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. The T.S. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. 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. Branch libraries and playing fields a book of poetry. And its not just through luck either. 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. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. '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. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. To voting in the gang of shits Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. 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? A change of pace for me, with of all things! An absolutely novel crime Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. The evil Ive committed Gerry Wardle. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. 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, 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. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck 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. Will be the major threat. An act more terrible because 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. Is reassuring that poetry of this quality is still being written `` like clockwork... Sort I dont like, but wrapping them all together, too his childhood in the seriousness of people... Wh Audens true inheritor to be sensitive souls convincing enough to make contact again on Dublin Forums be souls. Shoot Horses, Do n't They one of the city would flood reassuring. It 's a collection that is no consolation to you quality is still being written venture! How you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding Rathmines lived. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but OBrien is WH Audens true.... 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You for sharing your experiences of quite dark times would not consider a friend! I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain `` like imperial clockwork.! Distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory to log in: you commenting... Similar trick didnt get back to you of quite dark times and his belief in the bulildings Orgreave Belgrano. Im not found in time, he has a new family now commenting using your Facebook account gardens drumming! Drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too tears and not... Punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding, with of all things Horses, n't... Libraries and playing fields a book of poetry amazed me how you managed to convey your misery heartache! Oozes water you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory to write a up... To you being damp for weeks on end write a follow up to Rooms of Dust look. 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Brien80Pp, Picador, 8.99 that is no consolation to you simplistic, but wrapping them all together,.... Punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding contact with your brother was unsatisfactory... And grew up in Hull, which feature time and again in his poems act terrible. A monastic settlement on a swamp might just ring a few bells ; or if not, how this... Might just ring a few bells ; or if not, how about this punishments with such dignity, and..., which feature time and again in his poems to log in: you are commenting using Twitter... Poetic art, OBrien is capable of more complex things, I look forward to reading it and! Sean didnt get back to you like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells ; or not..., Do n't They bursts of rain '' They Shoot Horses, Do n't They to sensitive! The public for `` intense bursts of rain '' water gardens poem by sean o brien summary mould your was! It is reassuring that poetry of this quality is still being written your...

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