This is a shorter book than I was expecting but is compact enough to contain enough ideas to fill a longer one. By way of three lectures, Prof. O'Brien surveys C20th English poetry, with flashbacks to earlier reference points, through the theme of England and Englishness.
It is a fugitive subject and for the most part reflects the England that O'Brien readers have become accustomed to, a landscape of stopped clocks, endless afternoons in waiting rooms, a loss of purpose and a conspiracy against ourselves. It is to his credit that we are not unduly delayed by the idea of a lost Golden Age, most famously described in John of Gaunt's speech in Richard II. By now it has been recognised that there wasn't one and it has always been thus.
From the mainstays of Eliot, Auden and Larkin, we are taken through Douglas Dunn, Tony Harrison, most enlighteningly visiting Jeffrey Wainwright, then Peters Didsbury and Porter, Mss. Duffy and Shapcott, Simon Armitage (who is regarded as the poet most likely), to a surprisingly optimistic finish on the newness of experience found in Dalgit Nagra.
It is, of course, full of sound judgements and has dark, recriminatory reflections on the effect of the right wing press and politicians. Sean is never less than trustworthy if you enjoy a dose of caustic wit and his most impressive savaging is saved for the 'fury of incompetence by some blogospheric eunuch-defying Malcolm', which had me feeling a bit uneasy until it is made clear that this character is ' variously called experimental, neo-modernist, innovatory and "real" '. So it doesn't mean me.
Alienation is the diagnosis for much of the perceived discontent but engagement with such a chronically evasive idea is always going to be difficult to achieve. One remedy might be simply not to buy into such an identity in the first place. Although it might be the case that England suffers more than most countries from this complex, it can't be the only one.
O'Brien accepts that much has to be left out in fitting his material into the dimensions of these lectures but he gives us plenty of signposts to follow in our own time and, as has happened before, it is difficult for a commentator who has also contributed some of the significant poems on the subject to include their own work. As such, these pieces might be best approached with Ghost Train and his other volumes alongside, as an extension of those themes into the work of fellow travellers and into the wider history of C20th English poetry. There is a bigger book waiting to come out of this brief survey but one gets the idea and is grateful for it and the twist in the ending is well done.
