Downriver

by Sean O'Brien

While Downriver contains the English urban pastoral and hymns to the Northern deities for which Sean O'Brien is justly celebrated, the poet has always been more a singer then even his many admirers have sometimes conceded: here, that lyric note is sounded more openly than ever before. With Downriver, his fifth collection, O'Brien has produced his most various and mature work yet. This is a poetry of both delicacy and gravity, assuagement as well as agitation, rivers that start in hell but later fall as rain - and will only strengthen his reputation as one of the most gifted English poets at work today.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Sean O'Brien is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize (1995, 2001 and 2007) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only four poets (the others being Ted Hughes, John Burnside and Jason Allen-Paisant) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems (The Drowned Book).
Born in London, England, O'Brien grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived since 1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford, for 2016–17.

Reviews

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only collection of O’Brien’s I’ve wanted to keep. A tad easier to follow than his later work and with more bite (see ‘A Northern Assembly’, ‘Welcome, Major Poet!’ and ‘Amerika.’)