O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". 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. a book of poetry. Then I might perpetrate 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. 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. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! 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, I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. 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. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Some on ice and some on fire, document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self 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. are you writing a follow up? 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 . The Calm. its his loss though that is no consolation 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 found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. 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. As conscripts of le grand nowhere With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. If so, I look forward to reading it. 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. '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. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. He has a new family now. Is as secretive as thought. An absolutely novel crime Known only to the state . Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. 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. Great Britain! Gerry Wardle. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. 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. For in our time the future tense how sad that sean didnt get back to you. Thank you for opportunity to comment. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. "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. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Who staffed her army of the night: Start your Independent Premium subscription today. 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. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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. Just think, if Im not found in time, HI Jacqueline Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. 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. 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. 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. wonderful! And absolutely out of luck. To voting in the gang of shits The evil Ive committed Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". It was exciting. 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.. (LogOut/ A change of pace for me, with of all things! 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. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. 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. Strange: no one nowadays admits Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. The T.S. 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.". Some with slow piano wire, An act more terrible because Deliver rather lower yields I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. 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. 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, Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Poems by This Poet. 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'. 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. 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, In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. 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. 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. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck Kindest regards "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. i couldnt put it down. And its not just through luck either. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. X. just finished rooms of dust. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. The evidence, the court: Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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 O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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? Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. 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. Sean O'Brien. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: Our history, it seems, is quite 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 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. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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. 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. 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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, (LogOut/ 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 . 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. 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