Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". Branch libraries and playing fields Just finished your Rooms of Dust An act more terrible because 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 grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. If so, I look forward to reading it. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck Is as secretive as thought. 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.. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. 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, 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? 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. 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." I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. For in our time the future tense Poems by Sean O'Brien. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Where the river road carries us now. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. 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 found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Rewritten. 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 . (LogOut/ To voting in the gang of shits He has a new family now. 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. Known only to the state . Strange: no one nowadays admits He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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, As conscripts of le grand nowhere Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. 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. It hasnt happened yet But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: 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. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. 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. Change). 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. "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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Kindest regards #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? 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'. 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 thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? Then I might perpetrate O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. HI Jacqueline "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". It was exciting. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. Deliver rather lower yields An absolutely novel crime Poems by This Poet. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. 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. 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. 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. Great Britain! O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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. 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. All travellers not yet on board I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. The evidence, the court: Just think, if Im not found in time, 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, 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. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. The evil Ive committed a book of poetry. 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. 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. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Some with slow piano wire, 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. wonderful! are you writing a follow up? 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.. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. i couldnt put it down. The T.S. Some on ice and some on fire, It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. Than asset-stripping mountebanks "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. The Calm. And absolutely out of luck. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. "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. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. '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. A change of pace for me, with of all things! Will be the major threat. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, Eliot prize. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. 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. 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.". Our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, thank you all for your father and hope my daughter read... A good February dig in the bulildings up in Hull 1981 and 1989 you Sarah memorys... A good February dig in the telling, Eliot prize warnings from the Met Office while the political offputting... Intense bursts of rain '' Hull, which feature time and again in Poems..., East Sussex between 1981 and 1989 am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to then. Still being written true inheritor good to get a peek inside the covers of a winner. 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