Reading Sean O'Brien in the Bath

 Sean O'Brien, It Says Here (Picador)

The phrase, 'it says here' defrays responsibility for what is being said. In the title poem of Sean O'Brien's new book of poems, with which it begins, we are about to 'go beyond' whatever it was we thought we were about. Those who hear previous literature chiming through new work will find Kipling, Auden, Frost and Lady Chatterley's Lover and probably a few more that I missed. But those came from a history we have by now lost, now that the England that Larkin witnessed disappearing in Going, Going has gone. And with it seem to have gone any identity, self-determination or the free will we thought we had been granted but is forever beyond our grasp.

In Archonography, which the dictionary might not have but seems to mean 'the study of those who claim the right to rule, or to exercise power',             

                                 where we stand

And what we stand on must be nothingness, 

 

and although in Names, names will be the only thing left, in It Says Here the halt in the woods has had 'its name painted over' and in Three Songs, 'my place',

never had a name to call itself

If we are beyond identity and history, we have moved beyond the security, and constraint, of language, too.

 

In between two sections of shorter poems is Hammersmith, now in X cantos, I and II having appeared in a limited edition in 2016. Its lineage is by Somebody Else, from Ghost Train, out of Elegy, from November, the original 'in memoriam' for Sean's mother now extended into an imaginative, rather than documentary, reconstruction of his parents' early days together in London, as a useful note explains. 

The Boat Race, as it was in Somebody Else, is representative less of an England that once was but one that even then imagined itself to be and the loss is not of a Golden Age but of the idea of such a thing and, as Sean explains in his note, ' -perhaps the attempt to find or rectify something- is endlessly deferred'. From those first cantos, the poem extends further into recesses that meditate on and magnify themes from the rest of the book and the O'Brien oeuvre, its incessant song bringing back Ryan from his early work, who may or may not be an alter ego, and now also Mulligan, 'an indigent, long dead poet...who unhelpfully alludes to his unfinished and possibly lost poem about the Thames' that Hammersmith might or might not finally be.

If the rest of the book explores the world so many decades after the times it conjures, with our new post-meaning, post-truth culture of Trump, climate change, displacement of population, the moral vacuum of so many world leaders including our own little local problem called Boris (which Sean doesn't specifically name any of), the saddest diagnosis is not so much that,

                           The aunts

Do not approve of history

 

but that,

                                   Socialism

Proved too good for us. It asked too much.

 

The revolutionary's Olivetti

Lies beneath its crust of fag-ash

Like a relic of Pompeii.

 

Because, in those days, it must have seemed like there was a chance.

 

While the O'Brien litany of rebarbative complaint is familar, it maintains its powerful music and enough metaphor and all those poetry things that school used to like to teach us about but with vernacular enough to mean the teacher will need to pick poems carefully or else it will be Catullus XVI all over again.

In previous books, there was some respite with such poems as The Beautiful Librarians in the book of the same name or Goddess in Europa, both in their mannered magnificence but there is less consolation here. Even art itself is not explicitly cited as a means of redemption although Hammersmith ends with the slightest of hints that that is what it's been doing. 

 

It says here elsewhere that Larkin became more direct and uncompromising in High Windows. I hadn't realized that Sean had such space to move into but even in Larkin there were glimmers of light in the darkest moments.

It also says here elsewhere that Poetry in English 2000-2020 might not have quite the same magnitude of names that 1900-1920 had. 1900-1920 was a period of seismic change and so likely to contain significant figures but I'm doubtful about the last two decades being able to compete. Sean O'Brien is a name that suggests itself for the teamsheet. It's who else to put in that I'm concerned about.   

'It says here' was a phrase I used here from time to time in the past. Now I can't do so without looking as if I'm trying to be intertextual. And sic transit, the language uses itself up and echoes with itself.