Sean O'Brien, Collected Poems (Picador)
O'Brien at 60. It is one of those milestone occasions when an eminent figure undergoes the career retrospective. Much of what might be said has been noted along the way. We are familiar with the urban landscape of canals and railways, time stalled as the loss of identity or possibility of elsewhere are meditated upon, the apparent lack of opportunity for redemption and the imperative manner. It has increasingly been observed that there is something of Auden in the political warnings. And we have come to expect a facility with pentameter lines.
O'Brien himself acknowledges his debt to Douglas Dunn and in particular to Dunn's poem The River Through the City and that poem's influence runs through at least the first half of this collection. Not only the landscape but the atmosphere of darkness and threat, so much so that in A Donegal Golfer,
In my book even golf is sinister,
but, insistently and whatever the circumstances, the theme recurs and it is right from the start, on page 16,
The world is guilty of itself
that we are not ourselves or, if we are, it has been made our fault. The 'iron doors that bang shut in the sewers' in Dunn's poem echo for a long time afterwards in these.
During the period that O'Brien has been pre-eminent in specifically English poetry, the capital city of poetry in the UK has ostensibly been Belfast. Scotland has been in good form, too, with England itself somehow overshadowed. Those poets that have represented England have been noticeably from the regions and most obviously from the North, where O'Brien has been at home. But he has continued an English tradition that goes back through Larkin, Auden, Housman, Edward Thomas, Hardy, then to John Clare and Wordsworth and, one might say, to Piers Plowman.
Where Ted Hughes had remarked that,
the very sound of metre calls up the ghosts of
the past and it is difficult to sing one’s own tune against that choir.
O’Brien is not convinced, or at least decided that rhythm
suited his own purpose and was happy to identify with the long tradition
associated with it. The continuity of his metre is to be admired for its virtuosity and enjoyed
and, for the most part, is most effective without the adornment of rhyme. He makes
a fine music but it is more often a sturdy Beethoven than decorative Corelli.
The comparison with Auden doesn’t end with the call to
political engagement. Auden’s facility in verse was much to be admired before
Paul Muldoon’s poems took a quantum leap that made mere ‘facility’ look, well,
almost facile. O’Brien has always had a similar line in light verse to that of
the Wystan who enjoyed a Martini at 6 o’clock and the operas of Donizetti,
except that Sean’s light verse can’t be taken too lightly since there can often
be an iron hammer inside the apparently jovial velvet glove. And, actually, he
doesn’t very often wear gloves.
There are some identifiable common career trajectories among poets. An
elite few hardly ever write a bad poem (Larkin, Derek Mahon); in some themes
develop and even mutate to the opposite of where they began (Gunn); some reach
a mature period and become recognizably themselves with their third collection;
others find something to say or do and keep on saying it and doing it and
eventually suffer from the law of diminishing returns. You are welcome to add as many of
such profiles of your own as you wish. But Prof. O’Brien might belong with those
whose third book, HMS Glasshouse, was where he became the finished article and,
to show it wasn’t a fluke, followed up with Ghost Train, which for some of us
was possibly the book to define not only him but the best of a generation. If there is a development in the themes, we might think that the provincial inertia described in the earlier books starts to look to a more international elsewhere in later work and perhaps there is more sympathy emerging in later poems although in the November poems this has been engendered by a succession of tributes to poets and friends in memoriam.
The assiduous reviewer will search out omissions in a book
like this. Having not been selected for the Selected, I was disappointed to
find the exuberant tour de force, Piers Powerbook’s Prologue, not collected in
the Collected either. It’s a great pity in
my view but there will be reasons for it. It can’t possibly be an oversight and one can't imagine the poet and his editor going to two falls and a submission over the issue.
But the definitive titles are, of course, all in evidence- Somebody Else, Thrillers and Cheese, Special Train, On the Piss and more recently the tremendous Elegy. Here are the 'mad Mass Observers observing ourselves', the place 'unencumbered by meaning' that is 'endlessly repeated' and 'almost as real as the Boat Race' and those who,
find themselves seated in violent laughter
With like-minded womem - girls until looked at,
Whose heels keep on breaking, who cannot stop
Screeching or crying or finding themselves being hit
For misplaced and forgotten adventures
With other such mateys because it was Christmas
Or someone had won the St.Leger.
and the ending of Thrillers and Cheese is one of several passages that could have come from John Cooper Clarke.
If you said that any of O’Brien’s world-view was nostalgic
then you might do so at your own peril and I doubt if he is repentant about the 'strong' language that one only gets the full impact of with seeing the poems all together like this. But I‘m not sure that he thinks that poetry makes anything
happen any more than I do or Auden did. So perhaps his main theme is an
aftermath for the missed opportunities of Old Labour values, a post-1945
culture that by some miracle was almost brought into being but faltered in the
face of larger, more inevitable forces. That is all beyond retrieval now but he
provides a tough and sometimes strangely beautiful lament for it.