It Says Here

by Sean O'Brien

Sean O’Brien’s follow-up to his celebrated collection Europa  has a vision as rich and wide-ranging as its predecessor. Set against shorter, ruthlessly focused pieces—vicious and scabrous political sketches and satires charting the growth of extremism and the disintegration of democracy—are meditations on the imaginative life, dream and remembrance, time and recurrence. 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. At the center of the book is the long poem Hammersmith, a shadowy, cinematic dream-vision of England during and since World War II. Here, O’Brien charts a psychogeographic journey through the English countryside and the haunted precincts of London, mapping a labyrinth of love, madness and lost history. The result is a stirring, illuminating document of a time of immense societal flux and upheaval by one of our finest poets and most insightful cultural commentators.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published November 1, 2020

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

[Em Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a useful lesson here. On first read I did not get these and my review was going to be built around what it means to get poetry and to what extent it's like getting jokes, getting art, getting measles, getting drunk.

Second and third reads improved things immeasurably. These are uniformly strong. My heart sinks when poems arrive in cantos but given the heart, brain and skill displayed here I can forgive in thus instance.

Still do not get them but less worried now.