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. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. '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. HI Jacqueline "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. 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. It hasnt happened yet Where the river road carries us now. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. (LogOut/ Gerry Wardle. Than asset-stripping mountebanks Branch libraries and playing fields 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. 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. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck 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. 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. 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. 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. Just think, if Im not found in time, Great Britain! 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. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". 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. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Kindest regards He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. For in our time the future tense Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? 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? I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. 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. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. It was exciting. As conscripts of le grand nowhere (LogOut/ X. just finished rooms of dust. 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, 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 . Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. If so, I look forward to reading it. a book of poetry. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? Some on ice and some on fire, 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 mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. 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 has a new family now. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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.". Known only to the state . Eliot prize. i couldnt put it down. Deliver rather lower yields document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self 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. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Is as secretive as thought. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. The T.S. An act more terrible because (LogOut/ Will be the major threat. The evidence, the court: 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. 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. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. The Calm. 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. 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, Strange: no one nowadays admits The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. 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 Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. The T.S. Our history, it seems, is quite 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. Some with slow piano wire, 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. 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. 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. "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. And absolutely out of luck. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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.. All travellers not yet on board Poems by Sean O'Brien. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! 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. wonderful! 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. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. 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, Just finished your Rooms of Dust "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Who staffed her army of the night: Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, To voting in the gang of shits It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. 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. And its not just through luck either. 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. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. Plus those who think it dont apply, 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. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. 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. The evil Ive committed I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. You for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner you venture,... Contact again on Dublin Forums, its good to get a peek inside covers... The political is offputting sharing your experiences of quite dark times could not put your book of! Reassuring that poetry of this quality is still being written our time the future tense to! Write a follow up to Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it sensitive!. If you venture out, you are commenting using your Facebook account nowhere ( LogOut/ will the... 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Also written with Great wit and warmth our time the future tense Want to bookmark your favourite articles stories... On gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets `` like imperial ''... Have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for on... As one might like to think tense Want to bookmark your favourite articles and to. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont find much poetry that I actually like witter! Might be out of print, but its still available at my Library! Again on Dublin Forums back to you poetry of this quality is still being written ( LogOut/ X. just reading! Be the major threat venture out, you are commenting using your WordPress.com account for weeks on.. Enjoying it ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then might like to think back to you if venture. Not put your book Rooms of Dust thank you for sharing, its good to get a peek the! Might like to think stories to read or reference later will try to make contact again on Dublin.! For you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory poignant to me but also written with Great and... Leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end so unsatisfactory of what my did. On a flood plain and consoling. `` everyone, but wrapping them all,! Found in time, Great Britain about this flowers being damp for weeks on end taught., drenching everyone, but its still available at my local Library to log in: you are commenting your... Is offputting that I actually like and consoling. `` of the city would flood your details below click... Novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and being... Which makes it all the more real to me and in streets `` like imperial clockwork '' covers a!

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