{"id":1672,"date":"2015-10-25T11:49:18","date_gmt":"2015-10-25T11:49:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1672"},"modified":"2015-10-25T11:49:18","modified_gmt":"2015-10-25T11:49:18","slug":"sean-obrien-the-beautiful-librarians-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=1672","title":{"rendered":"Sean O\u2019Brien, The Beautiful Librarians – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

O\u2019Brien is a highly accomplished writer, but to my ear a surprising number of the poems in The Beautiful Librarians<\/em> are undermined by weakness in what should be the animating interplay of syntax and metre. The title poem is just one of them. It\u2019s full of fine phrases and nuances of implication, but for me it falls apart because of the way the syntactical impetus seems to collapse at the end of line after line, even as the sentence struggles on. In other cases, there are problems with the material itself. The political gestures in particular can seem tired and perfunctory. I can imagine \u201cOysterity\u201d going down well at a reading, with its punning Joycean title, its brutal caricatures, literary in-jokes and rueful self-lacerations, but it doesn\u2019t have the subtlety or inwardness to repay rereading.<\/p>\n

That said, there are a number of striking successes \u2013 enough to make the book well worth investing in. I won\u2019t easily forget \u201cThe Wendigo\u201d with its \u201ctunnel \/ Fireweed staggers on like wild white-headed Lears\u201d. The very fine \u201cAlways\u201d, set in a heat-baked Mediterranean harbour town, presents a series of images that are individually like sharply defined snapshots of the literal scene but cumulatively become far more than the sum of their parts, woven as they are into a richly suggestive, shimmering and elusive tapestry of emotional tones, through a series of reprises, variations and outright self-contradictions shot through with faint but haunting, horizon-extending allusions to other poetry.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d also like to give special mention to \u201cMutatis Mutandis\u201d and \u201cWedding Breakfast\u201d, but my favourite poem in the book is probably \u201cNobody\u2019s Uncle\u201d. Starting with an epigraph from Douglas Dunn (\u201cThat\u2019s one old man who\u2019s nobody\u2019s uncle\u201d), it seems at first to be describing a lonely old man in negatives reminiscent of Larkin\u2019s \u201cI Remember, I Remember\u201d. At the end of the poem, invited to step aboard this man\u2019s boat, we identify him with Charon, the boatman of the dead in Greek mythology and in the third canto of Dante\u2019s Inferno<\/em>. Suddenly earlier details take on a fresh force, like the reference to his \u201cstinking gear\u201d, or the statement that \u201cNo girls grown old think fondly of him now.\u201d O\u2019Brien misleads us at the beginning to heighten the impact of the revelation at the end. But of course the effect would quickly wear off if he merely displaced one understanding with the other. What makes it last is that the new understanding and the old coexist, like two cinematic takes at the moment when one dissolves into and shines through the other. \u201cNobody\u2019s Uncle\u201d isn\u2019t simply death; he\u2019s simultaneously the fiercely independent, bleakly marginalised human figure we at first take him to be and the personification we finally see him as. In the first aspect he both prompts and scornfully rebuffs humane fellow feeling. In the second he chillingly marks the boundary of all feeling, humane, human or otherwise. Here, as in the other outstanding poems, the seamlessness of the imaginative development is made possible by an almost equally flawless unfolding of syntax and metre.<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Peter and Ann Sansom for permission to post this review, which appeared in The North 54.<\/p>\n

Sean O\u2019Brien, The Beautiful Librarians<\/em>, 64 pp, \u00a39.99 pbk, Picador, Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

O\u2019Brien is a highly accomplished writer, but to my ear a surprising number of the poems in The Beautiful Librarians are undermined by weakness in what should be the animating interplay of syntax and metre. The title poem is just one of them. It\u2019s full of fine phrases and nuances of implication, but for me […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1672","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sean-obrien"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1672"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1674,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1672\/revisions\/1674"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}