i couldnt put it down. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Who staffed her army of the night: "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. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Poems by This Poet. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. 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 . 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. 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. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. The T.S. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. a book of poetry. And its not just through luck either. 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. 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. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Where the river road carries us now. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. 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.. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? 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. Strange: no one nowadays admits I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. 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. Our history, it seems, is quite 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. All travellers not yet on board Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. The Calm. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. Rewritten. To voting in the gang of shits He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. The evidence, the court: Some on ice and some on fire, are you writing a follow up? Known only to the state . A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. An act more terrible because 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. Is as secretive as thought. wonderful! 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. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . (LogOut/ (LogOut/ A change of pace for me, with of all things! Thank you for opportunity to comment. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck As conscripts of le grand nowhere I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. For in our time the future tense Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Gerry Wardle. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. Sean O'Brien. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. 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. 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. HI Jacqueline I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! The evil Ive committed Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. 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, And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. Poems by Sean O'Brien. If so, I look forward to reading it. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. 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.. 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. 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. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. Deliver rather lower yields True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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'. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. X. just finished rooms of dust. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Than asset-stripping mountebanks An absolutely novel crime 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. Just finished your Rooms of Dust Branch libraries and playing fields 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. Eliot prize. 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. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. 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. Change). Some with slow piano wire, Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". 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. And absolutely out of luck. It hasnt happened yet "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. 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.". Great Britain! The T.S. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. 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