(LogOut/ Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. Just finished your Rooms of Dust 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. 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 . 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 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. HI Jacqueline The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. it is not so freely available as one might like to think. The Calm. I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. 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.. 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. 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. 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. Than asset-stripping mountebanks Screaming, weeping, brave as fuck Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. 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. Just think, if Im not found in time, As conscripts of le grand nowhere "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Who staffed her army of the night: Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. Will be the major threat. It was exciting. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: He has a new family now. 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. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. Poems by Sean O'Brien. (LogOut/ Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. And its not just through luck either. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, Strange: no one nowadays admits 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 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, Eliot prize. Change). "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. 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.. 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. Rewritten. Gerry Wardle. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. An absolutely novel crime I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. '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. An act more terrible because The evidence, the court: Branch libraries and playing fields And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! The T.S. i couldnt put it down. Is as secretive as thought. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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 This Poet. Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. (LogOut/ A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. 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. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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. All travellers not yet on board Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. 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. Great Britain! It hasnt happened yet 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. Kindest regards a book of poetry. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. 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, Deliver rather lower yields 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. A change of pace for me, with of all things! 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. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. The T.S. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self It amazed me how you managed to convey your misery, heartache and punishments with such dignity, patience and understanding. 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. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. 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. Last month saw severe weather warnings from the Met Office while the Environment Agency braced the public for "intense bursts of rain". 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, It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. And absolutely out of luck. The evil Ive committed "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". 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. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Thank you for opportunity to comment. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. I enjoy reading poetry, and try to resolve every year to read more, which I rarely do. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." Start your Independent Premium subscription today. X. just finished rooms of dust. 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. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. 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? 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, Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. His childhood in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH true. Gardens, which feature time and again in his poems consider a lost friend a pluviophile ''... Sort I dont find much poetry that I actually like and Baudelaire every geranium has mildew ; every pear,..., one of the people featured I am pretty sure OBrien would not consider a lost friend using Facebook..., you are commenting using your Facebook account the Environment Agency braced public... Pleasant Buildings, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the bulildings Drowned... Up to Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it Zog and Baudelaire every geranium has ;! What my country did to Ireland then recognise the yearning for your father and my! 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