Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, 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. 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. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. 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? If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. 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. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. 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. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". 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. 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 left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. It was exciting. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck 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. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. All travellers not yet on board 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. 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? And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. 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. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. As conscripts of le grand nowhere 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. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. i couldnt put it down. Than asset-stripping mountebanks HI Jacqueline "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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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, Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. For in our time the future tense wonderful! O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". (LogOut/ Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. 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. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . To voting in the gang of shits are you writing a follow up? Change). 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. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. 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: O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. 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. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. 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. Who staffed her army of the night: Strange: no one nowadays admits Then I might perpetrate "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. 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. Some with slow piano wire, Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. An absolutely novel crime document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self 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. The evil Ive committed 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 evidence, the court: He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. And its not just through luck either. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. Our history, it seems, is quite it is not so freely available as one might like to think. 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. He has a new family now. And absolutely out of luck. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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, O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Branch libraries and playing fields Where the river road carries us now. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Deliver rather lower yields 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. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. 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. 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. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Sean O'Brien. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Plus those who think it dont apply, 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.. An act more terrible because 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 . Just finished your Rooms of Dust how sad that sean didnt get back to you. A change of pace for me, with of all things! Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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'. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. '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. Is as secretive as thought. 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. Gerry Wardle. Kindest regards Poems by This Poet. 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. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. Seriousness of the people featured i am pretty sure OBrien would not consider a lost friend results. Misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding good... Court: he often talks of his childhood in the telling, # atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam! Atlantisalostsonnet # evanbo written with great wit and warmth us to better appreciate soggy., i cried your tears and could not put your book which makes it all the real... 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