The Drowned Book

by Sean O'Brien

From one of England's most established poets comes a new collection of poems filled with scabrous wit and lyric assurance that are just as sharp as his five previous award-winning collections. Most recently, O’Brien’s Down River won the 2001 Forward Prize for Best Collection, making him the only poet to have won the Forward Prize twice.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published September 17, 2007

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

[Juliano · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sean O'Brien's 'The Drowned Book', something of a mixed bag. Some of the poems screamed dull, generic, of-a-certain-generation, while some of them were engaging, clever and fun. I loved his use of Shakespeare and his deviations in form.

[Maja · Rating 2 out of 5]

Somehow never quite came together for me personally, even though it is quite accomplished. I liked some parts and turns of phrase enormously, but there was almost no poem that worked for me in its entirety.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

I absolutely read this a while ago and forgot to log it it seems which is a shame because its his best I've encountered give It a go

[Edward O'Brien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having long ago struggled with O’Brien’s poetry, and mentally filed him away alongside Geoffrey Hill as one of those “difficult but important” poets, it was a surprise to find so much simply enjoyable in his 2007 collection The Drowned Book, one of only two books to have won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. An elegiac mix of dream, memory and history, it is as much infused with the traditions of sardonic Northern English verse as it is with Dante’s Inferno, a translation of which he published at around the same time. Death and decay are never far away, but nor is humour and a sense of the absurd. In ‘Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from a Tin’, flooded childhood streets... https://anundredbux.wordpress.com/201...

[Sylvia Clare · Rating 4 out of 5]

some lovely poetry, but some a bit inccessible too. Most took time to read and ponder during our morning ritual of reading poetry to each other in bed with mugs of tea. Certainly worth a second visit at some point, adn doing a little research on soem references we were unfamiliar with. But overall some fantastic metaphors and wonderful lines. I preferred when hewent slightly more zen as in 'only in eternity shall we encounter lakes.' totally love that and the simple truth behind this first verse

[Jane Holland · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sean O'Brien's latest collection makes superb reading. It's a dark but very human book, dealing with death and intimations of the afterlife. With luminous nostalgia and a dry understated wit, it looks back to the poet's past and forward into the unknown.

A book of elegies, deeply etched character studies - of places as well as people - and poems of reinitiation.