The Exocet O'Brien
Andrew Neilson reviews Downriver by Sean O'Brien (Picador £6.99)
Sean O’Brien is the most gifted critic of his generation, author of The Deregulated Muse, which stands as the surest available guide to contemporary British poetry. A collection of O’Brien’s longer reviews from the Times Literary Supplement would make for illuminating reading, and I vividly remember an essay on Auden in that journal which was crucial in drawing me to poetry myself.
O’Brien the poet is a less tempered beast, one known for forceful satires and skewed lyrics, with an impetus often inspired by the use of triple meter. The result is an impulsive sketching of O’Brien’s imaginative landscape, which is a grim and threatening North of England. At times in Downriver, his fifth volume, that grimness seems to be taken rather too far. Poems begin with lines like “The sultry back lane smells of fruit and shit / While everybody’s binbags wait...” (Noonday). In the middle, they might contain lines such as “A stink of burning sofas in the rain,/ Of pissed-on mattresses, and poverty’s / Spilt milk...” (Nineties). If you’re really lucky they will close with:
Gore and shite, crap-nebulae
And greasy bubbles, steadily hurled
Downstream in a stench of finality. Cheers!
(Acheron, Phiegethon, Styx)
Yes, cheers. There are also a lot of trains in O’Brien’s poetry, that staple of many a British poet (his last collection was in fact titled Ghost Train). Indeed The Eavesdroppers opens with the line “There are no trains this afternoon,” which seems to be O’Brien getting in the parody of his own work before anyone else does.
To be fair the first of the poems quoted, Noonday, is a fine poem which swiftly evades its familiar O’Brien opening to conjure unexpectedly with Suleyman the Magnificent and his library at Rhodes. The Grammar School Ghost is another poem with a mysterious air, imagining the sorry afterlife of a Victorian schoolboy. More expected are some excellent satiric pieces. The opening poem of Downriver, Welcome, Major Poet!, takes a crafty swipe at the Poetry Super League (was it Blake Morrison who came up with that execrable term?) and its accompanying cultish horrors:
Here it comes,
Any century now, the dread declaration:
And next I shall read something longer. Please
Rip out our nails and accept your applause!
O’Brien then puts the boot in with these acute lines:
Whatever you like, only spare us the details of when
You were struck by your kinship with Dante and Vergil.
That needed saying. O’Brien’s fierceness works hand in hand with humour. His parody of the English mystic Geoffrey Hill, Ex Historia Geordisma, targets both Mercian Hymns and The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz with exocet precision.
Downriver also shows the poet trying to broaden his palette. This results in one particularly striking success, the love poem Indian Summer. Here O’Brien’s gift for an accumulated sweep of description is turned to more lyrical ends, while the pressure of the writing seems to tighten:
But if the clocks must forever go back
To the meantime of Pluto, leave me your voice,
Its rumour at the confluence of Portugal and Spain,
From whose entwining waters rises, like a shell
Within the echo in the ear, your own supreme Creole.
If I am doomed to winter on the Campo Mediocrita
Whose high plateau becomes the windy shore
Of an ocean with only one side, to wait
Where the howling sunshine does not warm me,
Let me speak your tongue, at least -
For yours is the music the panther laments in...
When O’Brien writes like this I want to cry, in part because of the genuine beauty of these lines, but also partly because such intense lyricism is so rare in his work.
Other ways in which Downriver signals a broadening of range, can be seen in the The Underwater Songbook, a collection of song lyrics. This is an impressive series of poems which avoids the thinness such verse can manifest, while showcasing O’Brien’s confident handling of stanza forms. Familiar themes of the North and working class history are successfully revivified by their lyric setting. These lines from Songs from the Black Path give a taste of O’Brien’s adroitness:
Build me a city all builded with brick
And in that place endeavour
Builded with iron and mercury sweat
Cyanide pour bleu de Nîmes
The elementis, changed for everCulvert, tower and cannon mouth
Where war and science meet together
Commodiously dancing on
The head of heaven’s pin
Where man presumes on God’s despair
Original as sin
As a whole however, Downriver seems unsure of itself. The Underwater Songbook is the result of several commissions and there are a number of other poems acknowledged as such. There are also a notable number of occasional poems and the book is rife with dedications to fellow poets, including Lines on Mr Porter’s Birthday. Others read as if they should have been commissions; Sports Pages, for example, is an accomplished but rather workmanlike exercise in poems about sport. An interminable series of prose poems, The Railway Sleeper, revisits old O’Brien territory to little purpose. The closing sequence meanwhile, The Genre: A Travesty of Justice, offers a darkly surreal detective story which recalls the early work of James Fenton, to unflattering effect. The overwhelming impression is one of a poet caught in mid-career, professionally keeping his hand in. For all its bulk, suggestive of fertile creativity, Downriver is a transitional collection. One would hope that O’Brien can strike for the open sea suggested by Indian Summer with his next volume.
Page(s) 29-31
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The