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Since the publication of The Indoor Park in 1983 Sean O’Brien has shown himself to be a witty and accomplished poet and his fifth collection, Downriver, consolidates his place as one of the most gifted poets of his generation. Downriver is that rare thing, a book of contemporary verse that is both enjoyable and challenging, a poetry that accepts its responsibility to the reader to be entertaining without any sacrifice of seriousness or dilution of intellectual content.

     Some of the overtly political verse shows a strong and, to me, justifiable dislike of New Labour and its leader, “Tory” Blair. This distaste is pungently expressed in ‘A Northern Assembly’, a good, old-fashioned political tirade which, incidentally, shows an uncharacteristic carelessness in one of its rhymed quatrains where (on Page 23, 5th stanza down) an extra metrical foot in the third line briefly derails the poem.

     In ‘Piers Powerbook’s Prelude’ O’Brien supplies a clever parody of Langland which is both hard-hitting and witty in its vision of the current political and social set-up. But what to me is the most attractive thing about this collection is the vein of rather melancholy romanticism that runs through this book, even below bleak and sardonic or raunchy surfaces. The bleakness is less evident in the section called ‘The Underwater Songbook’ where some excellent lyrics make use of tricky Byronic rhymes and syncopated rhythms to splendid effect.

     The book ends with two longish works. The first is a prose poem or sequence of prose poems called ‘The Railway Sleepers’ in which O’Brien returns to a re-exploration of the theme of railways, a subject whose symbolic and associative possibilities have preoccupied him in previous poems. Here, we find a strange, melancholy eroticism which has less to do with Freudian notions of genital symbolism than half-remembered images of journeys, shifting landscapes, fortuitous intimacies, hopes and arrivals. The prose poem, a form which is hardly ever effective in English hand, works very well for O’Brien’s purposes and his evocations of his times and places and the curious glamour of railway travel avoid the kind of crude mimesis that formal verse would find difficult to escape from.

     Railway makes an appearance, too, in the last poem in the book, ‘The Genre: A Travesty of Justice’ which cleverly and disturbingly juxtaposes the conventions of traditional English detective stories with a grim vision of post World War II England.