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. Eliot prize. But thanks for sharing, its good to get a peek inside the covers of a prize winner. I am just reading your book Rooms of Dust and really enjoying it. Bob Young, http://www.dublin.ie/forums/forumdisplay.php?28-Harold-s-Cross-Ranelagh-Rathgar-Rathmines-Terenure. Rewritten. "There is something about the rain," he says, "that is both heart-breaking and consoling.". My father Michael Grimes comes from Rathmines and lived in Mount Pleasant Buildings. 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. Of course, if you venture out, you'll get soaked. Poetry has succeeding in reshaping gardening taste before. 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. "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. He has a new family now. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Your story is very poignant to me but also written with great wit and warmth . 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! Thank you for sharing your experiences of quite dark times. The Drowned Bookby Sean O'Brien80pp, Picador, 8.99. Kindest regards wonderful! Ive just finished reading your book Sarah, it might be out of print, but its still available at my local Library. As conscripts of le grand nowhere Can rake in flogging dope and tanks: (LogOut/ The T.S. Sean O'Brien. Change), You are commenting using your Twitter account. And when I was little, parts of the city would flood. Just finished your Rooms of Dust document.getElementById( "ak_js_1" ).setAttribute( "value", ( new Date() ).getTime() ); Follow @john_self Strange: no one nowadays admits 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. 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. 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. how sad that sean didnt get back to you. Join Zeno, Zog and Baudelaire 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 Calm. Are you planning to write a follow up to Rooms of Dust? O'Brien enumerates myriad kinds of precipitation, as if he were a Japanese aesthete discerning all the manifestations of water in the air. 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. 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. Who witter, witter, Im, like, why? I will try to make contact again on Dublin Forums. Our history, it seems, is quite I recognise the yearning for your father and hope my daughter will read your book. Thank you for opportunity to comment. 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. (LogOut/ it is not so freely available as one might like to think. "It's a mixture of a real park in Hull, called Pearson Park, with some changes made for my own purposes." 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. An absolutely novel crime He left Dublin when he was fourteen, married my mum and had me when he was nineteen. Poet Sean O'Brien was born in London, England, on 19 December 1952 and grew up in Hull. 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. All travellers not yet on board He often talks of his childhood in the bulildings. 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. With Peter Pan, the Golden Horde, The evil Ive committed Some on ice and some on fire, Wide, dark waters that grow in the telling, A change of pace for me, with of all things! An act more terrible because Deliver rather lower yields If so, I look forward to reading it. "I grew up in Hull, which was built on a flood plain. Is as secretive as thought. 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. i couldnt put it down. 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. Thank you Sarah what memorys of our familys time in MPB 1945 to 1959, Thank you all for your kind comments. 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. a book of poetry. Change). To voting in the gang of shits 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. X. just finished rooms of dust. It hasnt happened yet I felt your pain, I cried your tears and could not put your book down. Ditties like this may tread a line between simple and simplistic, but OBrien is capable of more complex things. Horace McCoy: They Shoot Horses, Don't They. Every geranium has mildew; every pear tree, sooty mould. Who staffed her army of the night: Known only to the state . Then I might perpetrate I thought that poets were supposed to be sensitive souls! 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 absolutely out of luck. Start your Independent Premium subscription today. O'Brien has every chance to pull off a similar trick. Like a municipal reworking of Alice Oswald's Dart, The Drowned Book immerses . 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. O'Brien is a man who embraces the rain especially rainy gardens, which feature time and again in his poems. 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. However I dont find much poetry that I actually like. 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. Most I read only to conclude that its the sort I dont like. For in our time the future tense "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. He taught at Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex between 1981 and 1989. I am Engish and deeply ashamed of what my country did to Ireland then. True to its title, Sean O'Brien's latest collection oozes water. 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. Some with slow piano wire, HI Jacqueline Immanuel Kant and Percy Sledge, "I'm a pluviophile," he cheerfully admits, speaking from his home in Newcastle. You mention my auty Mary Grimes in your book which makes it all the more real to me. 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