Embark

by Sean O'Brien

A new collection by Sean O’Brien – ‘Auden’s true inheritor’, and one of our wisest poetic chronographers – is not just a literary event, but also, invariably, a reckoning of the times. Given the nature of our times, his voice is an essential there is no other poet currently writing with O’Brien’s intellectual authority, historical literacy and sheer command of the facts. Embark also registers our unique cultural climacteric, where the larger crises of the planet – the pandemic and the terrifying spectre of revanchist nationalism among them – impact all of us, and where the illusion of a church-and-state separation of the personal and political can no longer hold. As the poet turns seventy, he shows us how the inevitable absences that age brings are assuaged by how we furnish them; the result is not just a logic made from loss and pain, but a music, a metaphysic, and finally a redemptive art. Embark reminds us of the enduring consolations of love, of friendship, of the freedoms and possible futures still afforded by the imagination – and, through O’Brien’s own exemplary model, of poetry itself.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published February 24, 2023

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

[🌶 peppersocks 🧦 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflections and lessons learned:
“They're irrevocable, of course,
the damp distempered rooms
that have not thought of you
in fifty years. But dust-motes
are still slowly dancing
in the gap between the curtains
someone's hopeful mother
ran up to surprise you with.”

Some beautiful lines and imagery throughout this collection, but I’m not sure that I understood the direction in many places? Was it in a different language from my understanding, or did I read too fast or in the wrong settings? A poet that I’d certainly try again to test the theory, but not sure…

[Joseph Schreiber · Rating 4 out of 5]

O'Brien, an established, multi-award winning British poet is described by the publisher as "Auden's true inheritor'. This collection, his 11th, is my first encounter with his work, inspired by a poem of his shared on social media. There is a pensive, even gloomy quality to many of these poems, but I find a great comfort in his images of aspens, the ghosts of old towns and landscapes, and memories of youth. This is the work of a mature poet, in age (he just turned 70) and in his confidence with language. But it is also very much of the present—the pandemic seeps into a number of pieces, as does a sense that the world is seeing the rise of troubling movements that demonstrate how the lessons of war are so easily forgotten. But above all, his imagery moves me:

"In these days of howling sunshine
when in the grove the aspens fret and pull
like maddened horses now silver now grey
in the curdling light, when the leaves of the cherry
are first all hands and then all birds
that point the way they cannot travel with you,
what then is to be done?"
– from "Poem in German"

An extended review can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2023/02/28/on...

[Mark Brooks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have enjoyed Sean's previous poetry and very much enjoyed this too, dark, mournful , full of ghosts from the past and for me a strong feeling of moving on as well, both personal and life itself , to where, no,one knows .A rueful tone throughout I felt. Favourites are Wine-glasses , '76 , and the final poem , Star of Bethlehem.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

strong and my favourite over November! my annotations do have a sweet time of it here. Master of the long sentence - Furniture. Wine-Glasses a very memorable piece