Top 6 - Sean O'Brien

There wasn't long between me reading Sean O'Brien's poem, Latinists, in the Independent on Sunday's feature in the sometime early 90's and him taking up his place among my favourite poets. And its last lines (which I only look up here to be sure) have become a chiming model of great poetry for me ever since, describing the schoolmaster's reaction to the young Sean's much-vaunted lack of Latin acumen,

When the stare you award me

Takes longer than Rome did

To flower and vanish, I notice

The bells are not working in heaven today.

Brilliant. There is a strong-armed intensity about the way that O'Brien has made his way to a central position in the sometimes gang wars of English poetry, as critic, anthologist and academic that would be frightening if it wasn't backed up by some of the most memorable poems written in the period. His poetry, at its best, has the power and rancour to take the English tradition of Larkin, and before that, Edward Thomas, to something they seem to now call 'the next level'. It's a little bit cross about things- yes, that's fine- but being angry is no use if you can't show us what you're thinking.

In Somebody Else and Special Train, we are shown the aftermath of what might have been England, something we might have been able to be proud of. Thomas and Larkin and even Betjeman saw it going but O'Brien saw it gone, the de-personalized, alienated, self-accusing wilderness, as perhaps,

We have sat here at twenty past six

On the wrong side of England forever,

Like mad Mass Observers observing ourselves.

The late night watchman in Thrillers and Cheese has a clear view of this nightmare underside where some perception bubbles up like a nasty thing after dark but it is our fault, our complacency and (obviously) not Sean's.

But it's not so grim as to exclude wit and the seminal tour de force Piers Powerbook's Prologue is a 'state of the nation' address in the style of Piers Plowman taking an in-depth, runaround glimpse of corruption and a place gone to bad, which it has apparently been for at least 600 years. Which reminds me of the review of the selected poems in Cousin Coat that one magazine printed for me then (perhaps even paid me for) which discussed more poems that weren't selected than were.

And so, with only one choice left, I personally go for the well-done tribute to Thom Gunn, somehow inevitably, but for the way it makes use of so many essentially Gunn words in a Gunn form and looks back admiringly at one of our greater predecessors. It might be inter-textual, pastiche, studied and all of that but it's also excellent, felt, appropriate and beautiful.