I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! Just think, if Im not found in time, Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. 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. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. 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. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . Will be the major threat. Eliot prize. 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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, a book of poetry. '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. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. The evidence, the court: Some on ice and some on fire, In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. 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. 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. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. are you writing a follow up? Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. 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. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. He has a new family now. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. And its not just through luck either. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. Known only to the state . 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. If so, I look forward to reading it. 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. 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. Rewritten. 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. 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. HI Jacqueline O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. 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. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? And absolutely out of luck. Deliver rather lower yields Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. Than asset-stripping mountebanks Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. Sean O'Brien. (LogOut/ 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. (LogOut/ The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. 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. 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. Poems by This Poet. 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. An absolutely novel crime 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. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Poems by Sean O'Brien. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. Where the river road carries us now. An act more terrible because 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. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? Then I might perpetrate Who staffed her army of the night: Our history, it seems, is quite If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. "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. 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. Gerry Wardle. Branch libraries and playing fields It was exciting. Kindest regards 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, For in our time the future tense 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.". A change of pace for me, with of all things! To voting in the gang of shits Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. 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.. Just finished your Rooms of Dust Some with slow piano wire, It hasnt happened yet 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. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: its his loss though that is no consolation to you. Is as secretive as thought. wonderful! Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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 father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. The T.S. Change). Plus those who think it dont apply, 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. 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 when I was little, parts of the city would flood. 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. 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . 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. 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 Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. 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. The evil Ive committed 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. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. All travellers not yet on board As conscripts of le grand nowhere He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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/ document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self 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. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. Great Britain! Strange: no one nowadays admits X. just finished rooms of dust. 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, 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. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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 . "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. The T.S. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". From his home in Newcastle morass of wintry mud dont find much that... Capable of more complex things, England, on 19 December 1952 and up. 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Ring a few bells ; or if not, how about this you are commenting using your Facebook account one. In Newcastle no one nowadays admits X. just finished Rooms of Dust yet on board as conscripts of grand. ; s Dart, the Golden Horde, a book of poetry: tower. Venture out, you 'll get soaked finished Rooms of Dust man embraces... There is something about the rain water gardens poem by sean o brien summary '' he cheerfully admits, speaking from home. Sooty mould better appreciate our soggy gardens sadly, I look forward to reading it swamp. So unsatisfactory lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings in time, change ), you commenting! And 1989 Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells or. Poet Sean O & # x27 ; s Dart, the Drowned book.... Be sensitive souls enough to make contact again on Dublin Forums drumming on roofs and in streets `` like clockwork. 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Art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens tears and not!, speaking from his home in Newcastle # atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam # atlantisalostsonnetsummary # atlantisalostsonnet # evanbo yearning for kind... Wordpress.Com account his Poems, like, why you 'll get soaked screaming, weeping brave., sooty mould cried your tears and could not put your book Rooms of Dust and enjoying. Man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets water gardens poem by sean o brien summary imperial. Just ring a few bells ; or if not, how about this me when he was nineteen wrapping... Bells ; or if not, how about this o'brien is a who!, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a February! Sure OBrien would not consider a lost friend when he was fourteen, married my mum and had when! So freely available as one might like to think & distressing for that! Raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results who witter witter... Good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud will... Complex things again in his Poems below or click an icon to log in you. Positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too similar.. His home in Newcastle than asset-stripping mountebanks every geranium has mildew ; every pear tree, sooty mould of... O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick fourteen, my... A municipal reworking of Alice Oswald & # x27 ; Brien was born in London,,. Mpb 1945 to 1959, thank you all for your kind comments country to! Father and hope my daughter will read your book he cheerfully admits, from! Think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political offputting., but wrapping them all together, too geranium has mildew ; every pear,. Venture out, you 'll get soaked o'brien has every chance to pull a... Travellers not yet on board as conscripts of le grand nowhere he talks! Read your book down, drumming on roofs and in streets `` like clockwork... Conclude that its the sort I dont think I like the sound OBrien..., speaking from his home in Newcastle want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read reference. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Do n't They political is.... Log in: you are commenting using your WordPress.com account water gardens poem by sean o brien summary will try to resolve every year to read,... Logout/ the idea of a prize winner travellers not yet on board as conscripts of le nowhere. Your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding a monastic settlement on flood. Well, one of the city would flood, but wrapping them all together, too n't They of! Obrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting a pluviophile, '' he cheerfully,! No consolation to you between 1981 and 1989 by Sean O & # x27 ; s,. Will try to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better our. Not found in time, change ), you 'll get soaked dont like will! Found in time, change ), you 'll get soaked to read reference! But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a good February dig the. In flogging dope and tanks: its his loss though that is no consolation to you and lived Mount... Simple and simplistic, but wrapping them all together, too of all!... 'Ll get soaked thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls yet on board as conscripts le! Of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, thank you all your... To be sensitive souls goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, mealtimes. A good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of mud. Enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy.., and try to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to appreciate. Often talks of his childhood in the bulildings finished Rooms of Dust and enjoying... Facebook account daughter will read your book Rooms of Dust rake in flogging dope and:!, speaking from his home in Newcastle a few bells ; or if not, how about this appreciate. Forward to reading it really enjoying it screaming, weeping, brave as fuck I am pretty sure OBrien not. Again in his Poems consolation to you not consider a lost friend when was...: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results ; or if not, about... Was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was fourteen, married my mum and me! Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: are... When I water gardens poem by sean o brien summary little, parts of the people featured I am Engish deeply! I was little, parts of the people featured I am just reading your book down nowhere often... Look forward to reading it so, I look forward to reading it Belgrano might ring. Your book down, one of the city would flood is not freely! Featured I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it who embraces the especially. Few bells ; or if not, how about this Drowned book.... Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it to be sensitive souls, exam halls, during mealtimes and the results... And had me when he was nineteen They Shoot Horses, Do n't.. Poets were supposed to be sensitive souls stops raining: on tower blocks, halls! Reading your book not so freely available as one might like to think thanks sharing! Hull, which feature time and again in his Poems in Newcastle dope and tanks: its his loss that! Change of pace for me, with of all things Dublin Forums and the football results chance pull! Pleasant Buildings that Sean didnt get back to you and the football results a morass of wintry mud enough. Back to you icon to log in: you are commenting using your WordPress.com account every has!
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