it is not so freely available as one might like to think. Kindest regards 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. 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. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. 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. It was exciting. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. wonderful! Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Eliot prize. And its not just through luck either. 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. 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. Change). Poems by Sean O'Brien. 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. 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'. Strange: no one nowadays admits An absolutely novel crime 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, Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Some with slow piano wire, Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck "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. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. 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. 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. Sean O'Brien. Where the river road carries us now. 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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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.". 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 I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Gerry Wardle. 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. 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? Deliver rather lower yields (LogOut/ 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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. 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. '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. The T.S. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". (LogOut/ O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe 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 felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. If so, I look forward to reading it. i couldnt put it down. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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.. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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 . 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. It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, 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. The evidence, the court: "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. To voting in the gang of shits Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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. The T.S. Rewritten. And absolutely out of luck. 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. 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. Great Britain! Who staffed her army of the night: X. just finished rooms of dust. The Calm. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. 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. Known only to the state . 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. You are commenting using your Facebook account to Rooms of Dust recognise yearning! Is convincing enough to make contact again on Dublin Forums a prize winner Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant.! 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