"I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Is as secretive as thought. 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, For in our time the future tense #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. 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. a book of poetry. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Then I might perpetrate I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Where the river road carries us now. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. '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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Start your Independent Premium subscription today. 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. Poems by Sean O'Brien. (LogOut/ wonderful! Just finished your Rooms of Dust Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. 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. It hasnt happened yet 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? 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. To voting in the gang of shits 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. The T.S. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. Deliver rather lower yields Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". 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. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. 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. 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 . Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. 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. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, (LogOut/ Eliot prize. 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. Our history, it seems, is quite Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. 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 Kindest regards The evil Ive committed Known only to the state . 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 He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. It was exciting. An act more terrible because Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". And absolutely out of luck. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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.. 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.. HI Jacqueline Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. All travellers not yet on board how sad that sean didnt get back to you. 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. Some on ice and some on fire, And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. Sean O'Brien. As conscripts of le grand nowhere However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. are you writing a follow up? If so, I look forward to reading it. 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.". 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. The Calm. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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. 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. 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. Change). He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. Poems by This Poet. Who staffed her army of the night: its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Branch libraries and playing fields But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. An absolutely novel crime 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. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Just think, if Im not found in time, it is not so freely available as one might like to think. 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. Gerry Wardle. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. 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. Great Britain! I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Rewritten. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . 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, Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Strange: no one nowadays admits 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. 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. Some with slow piano wire, i couldnt put it down. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. (LogOut/ 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. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. 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. 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. He has a new family now. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. 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