The T.S. Our history, it seems, is quite HI Jacqueline Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck 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, 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.". 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. 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. wonderful! #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe Thank you for opportunity to comment. Is as secretive as thought. 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'. 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. Eliot prize. But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. Where the river road carries us now. Strange: no one nowadays admits '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. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! And absolutely out of luck. And its not just through luck either. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, 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. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? To voting in the gang of shits (LogOut/ The evidence, the court: O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. 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, Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. The Calm. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. X. just finished rooms of dust. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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. 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 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.". Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? It hasnt happened yet An act more terrible because It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. 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. 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. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. 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. Rewritten. Deliver rather lower yields My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. 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. 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. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire All travellers not yet on board O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". 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. Plus those who think it dont apply, If so, I look forward to reading it. Kindest regards 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 evil Ive committed Some with slow piano wire, I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. Poems by This Poet. 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. Known only to the state . Sean O'Brien. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. "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. (LogOut/ Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. i couldnt put it down. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. 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. An absolutely novel crime Poems by Sean O'Brien. Who staffed her army of the night: Will be the major threat. I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Then I might perpetrate 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. 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