Sean O'Brien - Night Train

Sean O'Brien and Birtley Aris, Night Train (Flambard Press)

This collaboration between poet and illustrator has the appearance of a coffee table book with special consideration given to its presentation with hand-written poems as well as black and white drawings. It is an impression augmented by the feeling that the poems are heritage O'Brien, back on one of his favourite themes, the railways, a hardened nostalgia of attitude and the atmosphere of a disenfranchised afterwards that the drawings capture perfectly.

There might or might not be a story of lost love referred to among the lines but more or less it is more classic O'Brien, back to his Ghost Train signature style suggesting that life is somehow occuring elsewhere or in a bygone age. Always well-turned and immaculate in diction, it is retro in perspective and even, one could say, retro-O'Brien. For indeed,
why else
Would you be sitting looking out
And catching in the window the concern
Of those to whom you might be anyone
Or nobody at all

One minor complaint might be that the hand-written poems in a stylised italic hand did make me have to look harder at a word here or there which slowed the reading once or twice. It is a fragmentary 'sequence' and sequence isn't something I personally relish but I'd be the last to be churlish at the arrival of new poems by O'Brien, top practitioner and arbiter of contemporary poetry as he is. If it isn't his best work then it is at least yards ahead of most new poetry that will have been published this year.

As homage, and perhaps to suggest that once one is in the groove that O'Brien-ism is a style one can reel off quite effectively, my pastiche here is offered with respect and affection, hoping that I've not subliminally lifted any actual lines from real poems. Pastiche is imitation, not merely copying the stuff out.

Pastiche O'Brien

This is the kingdom of modern
disappointment. You came here
on a day's excursion once
and, for reasons you may now
have forgotten, never returned
to your native place.
You say that you don't know what to think,
imagining that thinking is the preserve
of those who can afford it
and so you stopped a long time ago.
The places that you went when you were younger
are overgrown with bracken
and rare lichens that camouflage
themselves in undistinguished colours.
And haberdashery is an excuse
for sex now, and happens
on Sunday afternoons
before the start of The Antiques Roadshow
where one day you expect to see
yourself undervalued. Wait patiently.