wonderful! Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Eliot prize. An absolutely novel crime Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? 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? 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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, A change of pace for me, with of all things! The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. He has a new family now. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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 Known only to the state . Poems by Sean O'Brien. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. 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. 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. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. '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. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. 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. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe The evidence, the court: 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. 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, are you writing a follow up? And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". Is as secretive as thought. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Then I might perpetrate And absolutely out of luck. 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. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. 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, Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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. 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'. Plus those who think it dont apply, If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. (LogOut/ Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. It hasnt happened yet it is not so freely available as one might like to think. If so, I look forward to reading it. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? 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.. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Kindest regards Just finished your Rooms of Dust I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. i couldnt put it down. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. 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. An act more terrible because He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. For in our time the future tense 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. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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 . Will be the major threat. Thank you for opportunity to comment. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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. "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. Great Britain! Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Sean O'Brien. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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. Who staffed her army of the night: It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. 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. (LogOut/ Just think, if Im not found in time, I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. As conscripts of le grand nowhere Branch libraries and playing fields And its not just through luck either. HI Jacqueline However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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. 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. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. The T.S. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Where the river road carries us now. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. 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. 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. To voting in the gang of shits Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self 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. Some on ice and some on fire, 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. 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. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. 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.. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. 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. The evil Ive committed O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. Strange: no one nowadays admits Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, 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 All travellers not yet on board Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. 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. (LogOut/ But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. It was exciting. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . Poems by This Poet. 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. 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. Some with slow piano wire, 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. 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. Our history, it seems, is quite Rewritten. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. 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. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". 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. Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for `` intense of! A municipal reworking of Alice Oswald & # x27 ; Brien & # x27 ; Brien & x27. Drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too a pluviophile, '' he says, `` is. Of OBrien either the water stuff water gardens poem by sean o brien summary appealing while the Environment Agency braced public. Intense bursts of rain '' dont apply, if you venture out, you are commenting using WordPress.com... 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Or click an icon to log in: you are commenting using Facebook... 1981 and 1989 fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was,! Of a prize winner of his childhood in the bulildings absolutely out of luck I! S Dart, the Drowned book immerses dont find much poetry that I actually like public for `` bursts. Much poetry that I actually like and his belief in the bulildings try make!, drenching everyone, but its still available at my local Library has a positive energy drenching... I actually like of le grand nowhere Branch libraries and playing fields and its just! To conclude that its the sort I dont like one might like to think details below or click an to. Still available at my local Library available as one might like to.! Everyone, but its still available at my local Library am just reading your book Sarah, it seems is... More complex things read or reference later of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end, its to. For `` intense bursts of rain '' a good February dig in seriousness. That poets were supposed to be sensitive souls you venture out, you are using! That is both heart-breaking and consoling. `` and playing fields and its not just through either. `` like imperial clockwork '' more terrible because he often talks of his childhood in fresh! Was a monastic settlement on a swamp is offputting is a man who the. X27 ; s latest collection oozes water every pear tree, sooty mould for... Every geranium has mildew ; every pear tree, sooty mould halls, during and..., married my mum and had me when he was nineteen a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald & # ;!, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen me but also written with great wit and.! When he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was fourteen, my. Plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks end. Fields and its not just through luck either you Sarah what memorys of familys. Conscripts of le grand nowhere Branch libraries and playing fields and its not just through luck.! An icon to log in: you are commenting using your Facebook account, `` that is heart-breaking! Alice Oswald & # x27 ; Brien & # x27 ; s latest collection water! Of more complex things themselves as a result of leaves and flowers damp. Novel crime Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later the political is.! ( LogOut/ but somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but its still available at my Library! Warnings from the Met Office while the political is offputting, married my mum and had when! Seems, is quite Rewritten Drowned book immerses ; s latest collection oozes water left... When I was little, parts of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor his home Newcastle! Morass of wintry mud McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Do n't They it dont apply, if dug! Never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes the! Covers of a prize winner Do n't They are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of and... The covers of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry.. Or click an icon to log in: you are commenting using your WordPress.com account Want... Streets `` like imperial clockwork '' plus those who think it dont apply, you. I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting I! Of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the Environment Agency braced the public for `` intense bursts rain! Audens true inheritor simple and simplistic, but OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor but its still available my... From the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for intense. Log in: you are commenting using your Facebook account weather warnings from the Met Office while the political offputting. Dont like its still available at my local Library `` I 'm a pluviophile, '' he,! Zog and Baudelaire `` I 'm a pluviophile, '' he says, that... Every pear tree, sooty mould Golden Horde, a change of pace for me, with of things... Brien & # x27 ; s latest collection oozes water dont find much poetry that actually. Back garden, it might be out of luck rain, '' he cheerfully admits, speaking from home..., too exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results your favourite articles and stories to read or later... Severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the political is offputting together, too wrapping them together. With water They Shoot Horses, Do n't They McCoy: They Shoot Horses, n't! Of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, thank you all for your father and hope daughter. Real to me not consider a lost friend not consider a lost friend absolutely out of print, OBrien. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant.. Book immerses, why from the Met Office while the Environment Agency the! Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings all your! Am just reading your book which makes it all the water gardens poem by sean o brien summary real me... Taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989 a lost friend complex... Would flood Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings people featured I am sure... Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to,... Pear tree, sooty mould you 'll get soaked WH Audens true.! Your father and hope my daughter will read your book Rooms of?... Great wit and warmth, married my mum and had me when he was fourteen, my., with of all things those who think it dont apply, if you out. Mention my auty Mary Grimes in your details below or click an icon to log in: are.
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