{"id":2695,"date":"2023-11-02T14:24:33","date_gmt":"2023-11-02T14:24:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2695"},"modified":"2023-11-02T14:24:43","modified_gmt":"2023-11-02T14:24:43","slug":"sean-obriens-embark-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/?p=2695","title":{"rendered":"Sean O’Brien’s Embark – review"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Embark<\/em>, Sean O\u2019Brien deftly shifts between registers and tones to present and think about the world in different ways. In his elegies, melancholy recollection is expressed in a way that combines elegance with conversational intimacy. Other poems are more obviously highly wrought, like \u2018Of the Angel\u2019 with its archaic-sounding title. This describes a boy at a Remembrance Day ceremonial \u2013<\/p>\n

The poor mad angel boy of twelve
\nWith the unblinking gold-green stare
\nAnd the frightening permanent smile<\/p>\n

That should be love but cannot be
\nIs brought by his mother to join the crowd.<\/p>\n

That opening already trembles between the mundane and the visionary. Compassion and the near-banality of line 5 ground the boy in ordinary life but the visual image blazes like a Gauguin painting. At the end, oracular comment of extraordinary intensity and power presents a despairing vision of the indifference of the universe and the annihilation waiting for all:<\/p>\n

There is no home or resting place.
\nThe broken ground will have us all
\nIndifferently back. And here he is,<\/p>\n

Imprisoned in his element,
\nThe angel boy who neither lives nor dies.
\nWhere can his mother be? He waits among us,<\/p>\n

Innocent and terrible. His smile is death,
\nAnd like the world his green-gold gaze
\nThat should be love sees nothing everywhere.<\/p>\n

Crucially, this vast annihilating vision is still anchored to the physical presence of the boy. The tension created between human sympathy and the bleak vision of cosmic indifference is what makes recognition of the latter so devastating.<\/p>\n

A different beauty appears in the sardonically playful grace of the micropoems of \u2018Woodworks\u2019. \u2018Rooks\u2019 is one:<\/p>\n

The sitting tenants of the hilltop
\nkeep a weather eye on everything.
\nOh, they\u2019ve heard it all before.
\nSurprise us, they say. Go on. Thought not.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

The metaphor faces two ways: we see rooks as cynical, life-bruised people and people as cynical, life-bruised rooks. It\u2019s presented with the lightest, most humorous\u00a0 touch but implies both pathos and anger. It\u2019s the poet\u2019s reticence that makes the little poem so suggestive, inviting the reader\u2019s imagination to play around different ways of seeing the people and life-situations they evoke.<\/p>\n

Such supple movement between different fields of knowledge or experience and reference, different levels of seriousness, different modes of address implying different relationships to the reader, is the fruit of many years\u2019 writing (this is apparently O\u2019Brien\u2019s eleventh collection). It\u2019s also the fruit of many years\u2019 reading<\/em>. The writing can be highly allusive, sometimes in ways declared on the surface, in references to figures like Rilke, Heaney, Heraclitus and Chateaubriand, Klee and Arcimboldo, or songs like the Grateful Dead\u2019s \u2018Box of Rain\u2019. Often it\u2019s through quotations one may or may not recognise, quietly absorbed into the texture of O\u2019Brien\u2019s own words. Such literariness is obviously deeply embedded in O\u2019Brien\u2019s way of thinking. What\u2019s striking, though, is how tactfully he ensures that it\u2019s not a barrier to the less literary reader. There\u2019s an extreme example in the magnificent \u2018Waterworks\u2019. This starts with a memorably phrased image of falling rain:<\/p>\n

\u00a0Indifferent to sorrow as to time,
\nthe rain is bouncing off the outhouse roof<\/p>\n

Actual rain and metaphorical analogues to it pervade the poem. In the middle comes the statement<\/p>\n

Poor pelting slums and summer palaces
\nalike endure the rain<\/p>\n

\u2018Summer palaces\u2019 nods to Eliot\u2019s \u2018Journey of the Magi\u2019 but makes perfect sense on its own, in a world in which the homes of the super-rich effectively are palaces. \u2018Pelting slums\u2019 is given adequate meaning by the imagery of rain.\u00a0 However, for those who do pick up the reference to Edgar in Shakespeare\u2019s King Lear<\/em> as he prepares to assume the role of the beggar Poor Tom and<\/p>\n

…………………………………….<\/span>from low farms,
\nPoor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills,
\nSometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
\nEnforce their charity<\/p>\n

there are further dimensions of richness. Above all, it invokes the play\u2019s concern with government and its violent contrasts of social justice and injustice, benevolence and cruelty, superfluity and deprivation \u2013 things that have been so much at issue in O\u2019Brien\u2019s earlier books. They\u2019re less explicitly developed in this one, but pervasively implied in its background, and this poem contains a particularly sharp slash at government spin:<\/p>\n

……….<\/span>a mountainside collapses on a train<\/p>\n

and we sit waiting for the minister to tell us
\nwhat\u2019s wrong now. We know he\u2019ll blame the rain
\nfor raining and the poor for drawing breath<\/p>\n

Throughout Embark<\/em>, I warmed to O\u2019Brien\u2019s gentle humanity. All the poems seemed to grow out of his concern for people, the emotions they feel and the lives they\u2019re given. Though steeped in high culture, sometimes framing his subjects in almost metaphysical anguish, he never sounded cerebral or remote. His stance towards the reader always implied a courteous invitation to shared reflection.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Sean O\u2019Brien<\/strong>, Embark<\/em>, 72pp, \u00a310.99, Picador Poetry, 2022<\/p>\n

I would like to thank Ann and Peter Sansom and Suzannah Evans for permission to post this extract from my review of books by Sean O’Brien, Philip Gross and Selima Hill in issue 69 of The North.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Embark, Sean O\u2019Brien deftly shifts between registers and tones to present and think about the world in different ways. In his elegies, melancholy recollection is expressed in a way that combines elegance with conversational intimacy. Other poems are more obviously highly wrought, like \u2018Of the Angel\u2019 with its archaic-sounding title. This describes a boy […]<\/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-2695","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\/2695"}],"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=2695"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2695\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2698,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2695\/revisions\/2698"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/edmundprestwich.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}