The Beautiful Librarians

by Sean O'Brien

Each poem in Sean O'Brien's superb new collection opens on a wholly different room, vista or landscape, each drawn with the poet's increasingly refined sense of tone, history and rhetorical assurance. The Beautiful Librarians is a stock-taking of sorts, and a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our culture, often overlooked by both capital and official account. Here we find infantrymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar - but none more heroic than the librarians of the title, those silent and silencing guardians of literature and knowledge who, the poet reminds us, also had lives of their own to be celebrated. Elsewhere we find a 12-bar blues sung by Ovid, a hymn to a grey rose, a writing course from hell, and a very French exercise in waiting. A book of terrific variety of theme and form, The Beautiful Librarians is another bravura performance from the most garlanded English poet of his generation.

Genres: Poetry

67 pages, Paperback

First published March 12, 2015

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

[Judy Croome · Rating 2 out of 5]

Part of my statement of poetics is that 21st century poetry should be written in such a way that not only literary professionals, but Everyman and Everywoman can relate to the words, meaning and emotions contained in the poetic form.

O'Brien's The Beautiful Librarians contains some lyrical and thought-provoking words but is, overall, too obscure for my taste in poetry.

[Elancharan Gunasekaran · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essence of truth and a lifetime of experience.

[József-Sándor Török · Rating 2 out of 5]

The Beautiful Librarians by Sean O’Brien is a poetry collection designed to be a celebration of “unsung but central figures in our culture, often overlooked by both capital and official account”. Some lyrical, some thought-provoking, some rather confusing and lacking a proper meaning, O’Brien’s poems are considered to be the embodiment of a lifetime of experience; however, I (mostly) found them difficult to relate to.

I chose The Beautiful Librarians for the particular reason that its title spoke to me and, consequently, my expectations were set too high – needless to say I expected to love the poetry collection. One cannot deny O’Brien’s expertise and capacity, neither can we deny that he has a bewitching way with words; however, his poems are rather difficult to resonate with as I feel they were mostly written for scholars/literary professionals. Whether acceptable or not and regardless of coming off as judgmental, I will always mention accessibility and 21st century poetry in the same context, and this collection was hardly accessible. While I have to admit that the poems are different and his style is quite diverse and everybody can find at least one poem to enjoy, most of the pieces are too obscure and anything but accessible to readers who aren’t literary professionals. So to say, in order for a poetry collection to be worthy of praise, it should contain more accessible pieces anybody can relate to. However, this is also a matter of one’s taste, education and expectations. For me, O’Brien’s volume was certainly intended to be understood only by a handful of people specialized in a certain field of knowledge.

Although I found a couple of intriguing poems, most of them were hard to understand or digest. For those of you who are looking for a rather scientific and abstruse poetry collection, this might be a suitable one. Regardless, one must keep in mind that poetry must be read and if doesn’t fulfill one’s needs, it can serve as a term of comparison.

[Alarie]

From the title, I expected to love this book, and I did like the title poem, but most of the poems were too esoteric for my taste. I’ll focus on a couple that I especially liked.

I did a double take when reading “Another Country.” My first thought was that O’Brien was speaking of the American Civil War, but the stereotypes of conflict fit the English Civil War as well.

“You stand for everything there was to loathe about the South –
the avarice, the snobbery, the ever-sneering mouth,

The lack of solidarity with any cause but me,
The certainty that what you were was what the world should be….

Whenever someone sagely says it’s time to draw a line,
We may infer that they’ve extracted all the silver from the mine.

Where all year long the battle raged, there’s ‘landscape’ and a plaque,
But though you bury stuff forever, it keeps on coming back….”

While I normally favor free verse, I enjoyed O’Brien’s formal poems more. In “Grey Rose,” after telling us “no aftermath / Is absolute enough for death,” he gives us these lines that could easily have worked as a refrain in a longer poem.

“Grey roses worn on the lapel,
Grey roses rooted in the mind,
Grey roses with a sweet-sick smell,
Grey roses, grey with all regret
For all that has not happened yet.”

[Jonatan Almfjord · Rating 2 out of 5]

One of my first attempts to read and appreciate a book consisting only of poems. Well, I failed. Or rather, I suppose the book failed to charm me. Maybe I'll try poetry again when I'm older. But as for now, I'm afraid I can't rate this title any higher.

[Andy Hickman · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Beautiful Librarians, by Sean O'Brien
"The beautiful librarians are dead.."

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

What does he have against Rugeley?

[Stefan Grieve · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good title poem, and there is a certain lyrical beauty to a lot of the poems, but altogether this collection didn't give too much of a distinct impression.

[Rebecca Travers · Rating 2 out of 5]

Will I ever like poetry? This was genuinely lovely in parts, but I just cannot stomach poetry for a whole book.