He's one of the best players I've ever played with. As a forward, I'd say he's the best.' Johnny Sexton Seán O'Brien does not come from a traditional rugby background. He grew up on a farm in Tullow, far from the rugby hotbeds of Limerick and Cork or the fee-paying schools of Dublin. But as he made his way up through the ranks, it soon became clear that he was a very special player and a very special personality. Now, Seán O'Brien tells the remarkable and unlikely story of his rise to the highest levels of world rugby, and of a decade of success with Leinster, Ireland and the British and Irish Lions.
This collection, drawing on almost forty years of verse, represents the definitive guide to one of the leading English poets working today. It will allow the reader the chance to survey both the remarkable variety and the consistent quality of O’Brien’s work, as well as the enduring strength of his obsessions: these have helped create a tone and a landscape as immediately recognizable as those of MacNeice, Larkin or Eliot. O’Brien’s hells and heavens, underworlds and urban dystopias, trains and waterways have formed the imaginative theatre for his songs, satires, pastorals and elegies; throughout, the poems demonstrate O’Brien’s astonishing flair for the dramatic line, where he has inherited the mantle of W. H. Auden. Also included are selections from both O’Brien’s dramatic writing and his acclaimed version of the Inferno.
With an introduction by Helen Dunmore Come for a walk down the river road, For though you're all a long time dead The waters part to let us pass The way we'd go on summer nights In the times we were children And thought we were lovers. The Drowned Book is a work of memory, commemoration and loss, dominated by elegies for those the author has loved and admired. Sean O'Brien's exquisite collection is powerfully affecting, sad and often deeply funny; but it is also a dramatically compelling book - disquieting, even - and full of warnings. As the book unfolds, O'Brien's verse occupies an increasingly dark, subterranean territory - where the waters are rising, threatening to overwhelm and ruin the world above. Winner of both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes, The Drowned Book is an extraordinary collection, a classic from one of the leading poets of our time.
En route to colonize the extrasolar planet Tau Ceti III... Donn Cardenio, damaged veteran of Earth's disastrous first interstellar war, and two hundred fellow Caretakers are charged with caring for a quarter million embryos en route to colonize the extrasolar planet Tau Ceti III. Cardenio considers this assignment a chance to redeem himself from the ravages of the past great war. But, when one of his Caretaker colleagues snaps, Cardenio is forced to begin an investigation that leads to more questions than answers—questions about his relationship with his lover, his own past, and the nature of the mission he's on. Unfortunately for Cardenio, nothing is as it appears. His fellow Caretakers do not share his reverence for the lives in their charge; friends and lovers hide vital truths; and his enemies and rivals become allies. By the end of the mission, Donn Cardenio will confront the terrible reality of what he's done to determine how the future will unfold.
November is Sean O’Brien’s first collection since his widely celebrated The Drowned Book, the only book of poetry to have won both the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. November is haunted by the missing, the missed, the vanished, the uncounted, and the uncountable lost: lost sleep, connections, muses, books, the ghosts and gardens of childhood. Ultimately, these lead the poet to contemplate the most troubling absences: O’Brien’s elegies for his parents and friends form the heart of this book, and are the source of its pervasive note of départ. Elsewhere – as if a French window stood open to an English room – the islands, canals, railway stations and undergrounds of O’Brien’s landscape are swept by a strikingly Gallic air. This new note lends O’Brien’s recent poems a reinvigorated sense of the imaginative possible: November shows O’Brien at the height of his powers, with his intellect and imagination as gratifyingly restless as ever.
Collier South is one of the last independent beltrunners mining the frontier between Mars and the Jovian colonies. The mining rush is over, Ceres colony is long established, and humanity has been mining asteroids for fifty years. What started as a handful of small prospectors seeking fame and fortune has become the heavy-handed operations of mining corporations swallowing the independents as they go.Collier has no interest is selling out, and his debt load is rising. He’ll have to land a strike soon or he’ll end up trading his own biologicals to pay for his next meal. But Collier has faith. If nothing else, he knows his instincts as a rockhound are good. Problem is he’s not the only one who knows that. When he finally sniffs out a promising rock, his ex-lover and her shiny new corporate ship are there to steal it from him. Broke and desperate, Collier has one last chance to pay down his debt. What he finds this time has the power to change his life forever. Worse, it has the power to change the fate of the entire system. And it isn’t long before the corporations are on a hunt to pry it from his stubborn fingers.
At the Terran base on the conquered planet of the Mnemosyneans, Tyr Yllen is unique. The ultramodern techniques Earth teachers used are of no use with someone like Tyr. As an "Uneducated" he is considered little better than the village idiot. But when Educator Horace Mann arrives all the way from Earth, everything changes. Never in his wildest dreams could Tyr have imagined that Mann's teaching would lead him to battle for the survival of a psychic race of beings and the people who had conquered them...
Sean O’Brien is widely acknowledged as one of the most gifted English poets now writing, and as a leading poet-critic. Cousin Coat collects the best of O’Brien’s work to date; long-time O’Brien aficionados will be grateful to have so much of the early work available again, while recent converts will be delighted to find that O’Brien’s boisterous wit, intelligence and astonishing technical fluency were as much in evidence at the outset of his career as they are now. While some of O’Brien’s mises en scène and dramatis personae have remained constant over the years – the urban dystopia, the train, the rain, the underground, the canal, the lugubrious procession of conductors, policemen, head teachers and detectives – their shadows have deepened with O’Brien’s sense of their historicity and mythic power. His imaginative landscape has become impressively varied: as well as blackly paranoid fantasy and scabrous political critique, O’Brien’s work now encompasses English pastoral, comic set-piece and metaphysical lyric, and shows a growing fascination with song-form and dramatic verse. Cousin Coat represents the best introduction to one of the most significant English poets of the last thirty years. ‘The bard of urban Britain’ The Times ‘A collection which holds numerous satisfactions for anyone with a sense of humour and a political consciousness’ Guardian on Ghost Train ‘The most invigorating new book of poems I’ve read this year’ Sunday Telegraph on Downriver
Sheltering from an air raid in an empty underground station, a young woman encounters a strangely out-of-place vessel passing along the platform... A librarian cataloguing the manuscripts of a recently deceased horror writer notices one particular box, relating to his most mystical work, has disappeared... A young academic takes up residency in the former home of an obscure, Dutch poet in order to better understand the strange rumours surrounding his demise... Sean O’Brien’s stories are all lit with the unmistakable hue of the Victorian gothic: from the rantings of a deranged psychiatric patient, to the apparition of demons swarming into a remote, rural railway station; solemn oaths are broken and need atoning for; minor transgressions are met with outlandish curses. Often we join O’Brien’s protagonists attempting to take time out from their troubles, but removing themselves from their normal lives only lets the supernatural in, and before they know it personal demons find very literal ones to conspire with.
It Says Here is Sean O’Brien’s follow-up to his celebrated collection Europa, and 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 centre of the book is the long poem Hammersmith, a shadowy, cinematic dream-vision of England during and since the Second World War. 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. 'In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, O’Brien is WH Auden’s true inheritor.' Irish Times
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 one: 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.
The seventies. Summer. Four students in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Two young American women, one hell-bent on destruction. Alcohol, LSD, sex, jealousy, infidelity and poetry. At the end of the summer, one of the four students will be dead, and another will be destroyed by his inability to let go of past memories, guilt and bitterness. ‘A cracker’ Evening Standard ‘Chills to the bone’ Independent on Sunday ‘Rich and powerful’ Daily Mail ‘Afterlife positively throbs with loss . . . It’s a deeply absorbing novel that lingers in the mind like the ghosts it so ardently evokes’ Claire Kilroy Irish Times ‘A richly rewarding portrait of friendships under siege, full of vibrant characters and atmospheres that linger in the mind and the heart’ Sunday Telegraph
In a universe where hope dims like a dying star, one man's loss becomes his ultimate quest for redemption. Asteroid belt miner Collier South has hit the nadir of existence. Once a beacon of idealism in the cold, unforgiving expanse of space, he's lost everything: the love of his life, an alien artifact that had promised great change, and his irreplaceable companion, Sancho, the sentient ship’s computer. In the aftermath of tragedy, Collier finds himself at a crossroads—haunted by the specters of his past and the vast, uncharted territories of space that call to him once more. The discovery that nothing is ever truly lost reignites Collier's resolve. Armed with the recovered alien artifact, a beacon of untold power, he sets out to reclaim his ship, his friend, and his purpose. With the aid of unexpected allies and an unbreakable bond with Sancho, Collier embarks on a journey that will take him to the edges of known space and beyond. In a race against time and destiny, can Collier South mend the fabric of space itself, or will his final gambit unleash forces that could shatter the fragile peace of the cosmos?
Stephen Maxwell has just retired from a lifetime spent teaching history at his alma mater. As he writes the official history of Blake's, a minor public school steeped in military tradition, he also reveals how, forty years ago, a secret conflict dating from the Second World War re-enacted itself among staff and pupils, when fascism once more made its presence felt in the school and the city, with violent and nightmarish results.
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.
Jene Halfner awaits the end of a 100-year-long, deep-space colonization journey begun by her ancestors generations before. What she will find upon arrival will change her perspective on life, and she and her descendants will live to face the incredible challenges their new world holds.
While Downriver contains the English urban pastoral and hymns to the Northern deities for which Sean O’Brien is justly celebrated, the poet has always been more a singer than even his many admirers have sometimes conceded: here, that lyric note is sounded more openly than ever before. With Downriver, his fifth collection, O’Brien has produced his most various and mature work yet. This is a poetry of both delicacy and gravity, assuagement as well as agitation, rivers that start in hell but later fall as rain – and will only strengthen his reputation as one of the most gifted English poets at work today.
In this series, a contemporary poet selects and introduces a poet of the past. By their choice of poems and by the personal and critical reactions they express in their prefaces, the editors offer insights into their own work as well as providing an accessible and passionate introduction to some of the greatest poets of our literature. Andrew Marvell was born in Yorkshire in 1624 and was educated in Hull and Cambridge. He became the unofficial laureate to Cromwell and in 1657 he took over from Milton as the Latin Secretary to the Council of State. Famed as a satirist during his lifetime Marvell was a virtually unknown lyric poet until rediscovered in the nineteenth century. However, it was only after the First World War that his poetry gained popularity thanks to the efforts of T. S. Eliot and Sir Herbert Grierson. Marvell died in 1678.
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