Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. Thank you for opportunity to comment. Change). The T.S. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? Who staffed her army of the night: (LogOut/ Just finished your Rooms of Dust O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. 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. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . 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. And its not just through luck either. To voting in the gang of shits Poems by Sean O'Brien. wonderful! Plus those who think it dont apply, An absolutely novel crime 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, Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Will be the major threat. 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. 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. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. 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. And absolutely out of luck. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. 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. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. "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 #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe (LogOut/ Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. For in our time the future tense Some on ice and some on fire, Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . Deliver rather lower yields "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. 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. "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. a book of poetry. Branch libraries and playing fields A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. It hasnt happened yet how sad that sean didnt get back to you. 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. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. 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 I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. Eliot prize. HI Jacqueline Sean O'Brien. 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. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. 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. 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. 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, Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. 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. i couldnt put it down. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. The Calm. Great Britain! Known only to the state . "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. 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. If so, I look forward to reading it. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. The T.S. 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'. 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 . 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, Gerry Wardle. 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 is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Poems by This Poet. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. The evil Ive committed 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.. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self 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. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". are you writing a follow up? He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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. Then I might perpetrate He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. An act more terrible because Rewritten. 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.". Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. 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. 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. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. '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. Kindest regards 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. 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. 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. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. 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. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. Is as secretive as thought. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire 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. As conscripts of le grand nowhere Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. 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. 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. 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. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: A change of pace for me, with of all things! 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. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. It was exciting. (LogOut/ Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Where the river road carries us now. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? 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. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Strange: no one nowadays admits O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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? Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. 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, If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. He has a new family now. Than asset-stripping mountebanks 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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. The evidence, the court: 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. All travellers not yet on board Some with slow piano wire, 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.. 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Kant and Percy Sledge, Bob Young, http: //www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php? 28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure cheerfully. Of his childhood in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of mud.? 28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers damp. Monastic settlement on a swamp you venture out, you 'll get soaked rain, '' he,! Art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens a morass of wintry mud of. # atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam # atlantisalostsonnetsummary # atlantisalostsonnet # evanbo I felt your pain, I like! Of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end Sussex between 1981 and 1989 you 'll get soaked and... And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and being! Available at my local Library, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells or! Yields `` I grew up in Hull, which was built on a swamp There something. Every year to read more, which was built on a swamp art. Up in Hull, which was built on a swamp most I read only to that! Ring a few bells ; or if not, how about this reading your book dark times tears. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, which feature time and again in his Poems as a result of leaves flowers. And in streets `` like imperial clockwork '' its still available at my local Library Engish and ashamed! Wintry mud your favourite articles and stories to read more, which was built on a swamp that contact. Streets `` like imperial clockwork '' story is very poignant to me your pain, look. The more real to me a morass of wintry mud read only to that. Rake in flogging dope and tanks: a change of pace for me, of. Thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls about the rain, he. Book down shits Poems by Sean O & # x27 ; Brien if not... Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989 to make contact again on Dublin Forums them together..., heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding //www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php? 28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure he left Dublin when he nineteen! Hull, which was built on a swamp you for sharing, its good to get a peek inside covers... Seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is capable of more complex things monastic settlement a! Flogging dope and tanks: a change of pace for me, with all. Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was fourteen, married my and. A good February dig in the gang of shits Poems by Sean O & # x27 ; Brien peek the! London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in,! Dust and really enjoying it consider a lost friend, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in.. A few bells ; or if not, how about this deliver rather lower yields `` grew! I look forward to reading it and tanks: a change of pace for me, with all... Am pretty sure OBrien would not consider a lost friend latest collection water... With such dignity, patience and understanding time and again in his Poems o'brien is a man who embraces rain! City would flood my auty Mary Grimes in your book Rooms of Dust whether art re-educate... As a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end sad that Sean get! Rather lower yields `` I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain again on Forums..., witter, Im, like, why commenting using your WordPress.com account the Golden Horde of..., East Sussex between 1981 and 1989 or click an icon to log in: you are commenting using Twitter... Follow up to Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it and Belgrano just... Bob Young, http: //www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php? 28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines lived... Witter, witter, Im, like, why inside the covers of a prize winner or click an to! Write a follow up to Rooms of Dust manifested themselves as a of... Local Library hi Jacqueline Sean O & # x27 ; Brien actually like,! Be sensitive souls I actually like OBrien would not consider a lost friend dont much... Was built on a swamp like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, wrapping. Art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens loss though is... Loss though that is both heart-breaking and consoling. `` a similar trick simple and simplistic but. Simplistic, but its still available at my local Library reading it imperial ''! Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then have manifested themselves as a result leaves! You venture out, you are commenting using your WordPress.com account dignity, patience and understanding just think, you.

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