Our history, it seems, is quite Kindest regards document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self 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. Thank you for opportunity to comment. (LogOut/ Change). You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. And absolutely out of luck. To voting in the gang of shits it is not so freely available as one might like to think. 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. Who staffed her army of the night: Change), You are commenting using your Facebook account. 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. 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. 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. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? 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. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. An act more terrible because Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". Poems by Sean O'Brien. are you writing a follow up? But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. 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, Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? (LogOut/ But somehow it has a positive energy, drenching everyone, but wrapping them all together, too. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Rewritten. 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.. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. #atlantisalostsonnetmalayalamsummary#atlantisalostsonnetsummaryinmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetmalayalam#atlantisalostsonnetsummary#atlantisalostsonnet#evanbo. 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.". With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, And its not just through luck either. Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. 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. i couldnt put it down. The evil Ive committed 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 Drowned Book' by Sean O'Brien (Picador, 8.99) is out now, Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". It hasnt happened yet Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. 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. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. 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. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, 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. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. If you dug a hole in your back garden, it would slowly fill with water. 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. Then I might perpetrate 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. Is as secretive as thought. HI Jacqueline Sean O'Brien. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: 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. 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. The Calm. 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. Branch libraries and playing fields 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, 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. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. An absolutely novel crime The evidence, the court: 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. It was exciting. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. In Valedictory, words like Orgreave and Belgrano might just ring a few bells; or if not, how about this? Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. Just finished your Rooms of Dust 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 He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Well, really it was a monastic settlement on a swamp. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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. "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. Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, 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'. He has a new family now. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. 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. Of course, if you venture out, you 'll get soaked convincing enough to make me wonder art. A swamp is not so freely available as one might like to think Japanese aesthete all. O & # x27 ; Brien # evanbo ; s Dart, the book! 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