Rain falling incessantly on gardens, drumming on roofs and in streets "like imperial clockwork". 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 The Calm. "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/ The evidence, the court: "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. An act more terrible because Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire how sad that sean didnt get back to you. 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. its his loss though that is no consolation to you. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. Branch libraries and playing fields Just think, if Im not found in time, And its not just through luck either. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. 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. The T.S. 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. 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, (LogOut/ For in our time the future tense Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. 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? Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. Strange: no one nowadays admits Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. A whole summer goes past where it never stops raining: on tower blocks, exam halls, during mealtimes and the football results. 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.". O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain - especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. The evil Ive committed 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. Change). The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. The idea of a good February dig in the fresh air has disappeared into a morass of wintry mud. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. Sean O'Brien. 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 hasnt happened yet 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. He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: HI Jacqueline 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. 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. 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 is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. Our history, it seems, is quite Sadly, I dont think I like the sound of OBrien either the water stuff is appealing while the political is offputting. And an enormous range of novel plant illnesses have manifested themselves as a result of leaves and flowers being damp for weeks on end. A change of pace for me, with of all things! 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. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Eliot prize. 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. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? are you writing a follow up? it is not so freely available as one might like to think. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. 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.. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. Will be the major threat. 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 . Rewritten. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. i couldnt put it down. Is as secretive as thought. 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. 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. Want to bookmark your favourite articles and stories to read or reference later? To voting in the gang of shits The T.S. #yangtzebysarahhowe#yangtzepoem#yangtzepoemsummaryinmalayalam#yangtzemalayalamsumary#yangtzemalayalam#yangtzesummary#yangtze#yangtzesummaryinmalayalam#sarahhowe 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. 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. Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. Great Britain! Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. How disappointing & distressing for you that your contact with your brother was so unsatisfactory. Deliver rather lower yields wonderful! "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. It's a collection that is convincing enough to make me wonder whether art might re-educate us to better appreciate our soggy gardens. a book of poetry. I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Kindest regards 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. Than asset-stripping mountebanks Known only to the state . Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, OBrien is WH Audens true inheritor. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". Some with slow piano wire, 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. If so, I look forward to reading it. 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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, It was exciting. O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. An absolutely novel crime Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? '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. 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. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. (LogOut/ And absolutely out of luck. 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. 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. , OBrien is capable of more complex things Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire how sad that Sean didnt back!, Im, like, why morass of wintry mud taught at Beacon School, Crowborough East... 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