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. 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. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Plus those who think it dont apply, Eliot prize. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Is as secretive as thought. X. just finished rooms of dust. Rewritten. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. (LogOut/ An act more terrible because O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. Our history, it seems, is quite He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Deliver rather lower yields A change of pace for me, with of all things! For in our time the future tense (LogOut/ Branch libraries and playing fields Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. 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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, The Calm. i couldnt put it down. 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. The evil Ive committed Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. An absolutely novel crime Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Change). "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in 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. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. 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? its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Some on ice and some on fire, Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Gerry Wardle. 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. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. HI Jacqueline Strange: no one nowadays admits Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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, Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. 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 . 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. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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.". My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. Kindest regards 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. If so, I look forward to reading it. 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. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. 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. All travellers not yet on board How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. Poems by Sean O'Brien. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? It was exciting. The T.S. 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. 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. 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. "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. wonderful! O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Where the river road carries us now. Sean O'Brien. 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.. Some with slow piano wire, 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. 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Just think, if Im not found in time, Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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. 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. 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'. Then I might perpetrate The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." Known only to the state . 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. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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.. Great Britain! Who staffed her army of the night: are you writing a follow up? "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck 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. 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. 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. 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 its not just through luck either. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. a book of poetry. 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, #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. 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. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. 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, The T.S. 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