Experience in Groups

by Geoffrey G. O'Brien

Experience in Groups sings and thinks the forms of belonging that organize our lives, offering poems that move with honesty and formal intelligence between the individual and the collective. In a time of ascendant fascism and creative political resistance, O'Brien's work demands that an elegy, love poem, and a sonnet sequence become occasions where personal tragedies and joys find a pattern and a place within national and global struggle.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

Published April 3, 2018

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I'd characterize this as a kind of field poetics, and hear me out here: O'Brien has a kind of line, medium length, open to abstraction and digression, thoughtful and analytic, and the poems seems to be mostly collections of whatever he comes across, processed through this mostly durable, unfussy line.

So the question then becomes what does he come across here, and a lot of it is concerns about language and how it works, but there are moments here, especially around the halfway point in this book of long sequences, where very real world concerns, especially concerning the murder of young black men by police, make their way into the field. These are moments when the poems snap sharply into focus for me, when what O'Brien has earned with his patient thoughtful stance zeroes in on what feels important to me. In the end, though, these aren't poems of reaction or activism, but more likely poems of record, again, of whatever comes into his field.

It's a solid book of poems, rarely showing more than you get on the first page. But I liked it, even if its sameness maybe makes it hard to find particular passages that stand out. I'm glad I read it.

[Jared Levine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Totally inconsequential.