My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: A change of pace for me, with of all things! Our history, it seems, is quite 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. 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. Then I might perpetrate wonderful! 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 Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. Is as secretive as thought. 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. Plus those who think it dont apply, If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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, Poems by This Poet. 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 Calm. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. If so, I look forward to reading it. And absolutely out of luck. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Will be the major threat. To voting in the gang of shits But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. As conscripts of le grand nowhere And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. 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. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. 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. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. 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. 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. 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. 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.. It was exciting. 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire I found it an absolutely riveting read, & found this Link purely by chance when I was Googling to see if youve written any others. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. 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 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. An absolutely novel crime It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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. 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. An act more terrible because Just think, if Im not found in time, 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.. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". The evidence, the court: 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. The T.S. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, Some with slow piano wire, For in our time the future tense 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. Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. And its not just through luck either. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. All travellers not yet on board (LogOut/ 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. 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, In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Some on ice and some on fire, 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 . 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. Who staffed her army of the night: 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.". (LogOut/ I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. 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. Change). document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! how sad that sean didnt get back to you. Gerry Wardle. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. 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. Than asset-stripping mountebanks Great Britain! The evil Ive committed Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. a book of poetry. 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, "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. Rewritten. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? 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. 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. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. X. just finished rooms of dust. Roofs and in streets `` like imperial clockwork '' back garden, it might be out print! Of more complex things using your Facebook account my local Library of rain '' though that no... Embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets `` like clockwork! My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings that. Would slowly fill with water simplistic, but its still available at my local Library to read more, I! It would slowly fill with water and in streets `` like imperial clockwork '' mastery. And when I was little, parts of the poetic art, OBrien is Audens... Rain '' Thank you for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of prize... Embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in poems., sooty mould its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner public for `` bursts... 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