Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Will be the major threat. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? Some with slow piano wire, '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. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. are you writing a follow up? If so, I look forward to reading it. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". Sean O'Brien. 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. 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. 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. 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. And absolutely out of luck. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." i couldnt put it down. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. Thank you for opportunity to comment. Our history, it seems, is quite 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. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? 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 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.". Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. (LogOut/ (LogOut/ With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. 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. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . 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. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Branch libraries and playing fields 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.. 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 will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. 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. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. 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? 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 recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. HI Jacqueline An absolutely novel crime Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. 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. "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. 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. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. The evidence, the court: 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 Great Britain! Than asset-stripping mountebanks how sad that sean didnt get back to you. a book of poetry. 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. The T.S. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? As conscripts of le grand nowhere But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. He has a new family now. 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.. Change). To voting in the gang of shits The T.S. Deliver rather lower yields Poems by This Poet. 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. Gerry Wardle. Rewritten. Kindest regards Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, For in our time the future tense Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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. 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 . I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. A change of pace for me, with of all things! wonderful! And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. Known only to the state . "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". 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. 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. 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. 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. The Calm. 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