Sean O'Brien, The Beautiful Librarians (Picador)One opens a new book of poems by Sean O'Brien with some trepidation. What am I guilty of this time. Have I committed a stray bourgeois thought, an ideological non-sequitur or am I not from far enough north. And if any of those charges are not proven, we all remain guilty of being ourselves through no fault of our own.
Somebody has piqued O'Brien with the phrase, Earlier Stuff, which leads him into a familiar journey through England's desolate heartland. But some poets, like Yeats, have earlier and later 'stuff' and there is a need to differentiate between them in the 'life of the mind' of some who shall remain nameless. But perhaps in O'Brien, as it might be said of Larkin, there are only shades and slight gradations of difference from, say HMS Glasshouse, in 1991, and now. And The Frighteners still haunt The Indoor Park. It is almost a comfort to find ourselves in territory we know already. O'Brien's work overlaps with itself and 'Never Can Say Goodbye' recurs, The Lost of England is a sequel to Somebody Else and the title poem owes something to Latinists. The Lost of England is a train journey that has Larkin's famous ride in the back of its mind with its cooling towers and its,
we seemed
to slow continually inside the rainy summer heat
likely to trigger thoughts of 'an arrow shower sent out of sight'.
In War Graves, it does seem an unworthy tribute to the war dead that the 'trap of elegy', is
to find ourselves composed
Entirely of literature.
But some of us, less heroically and later, almost are.
Many of these poems are between one thing and another. Lights are coming on because it is getting dark; there are several Thirteen O'Clocks and, in Audiology, we become aware of 'the world behind this world'; and, yes, we might also be
witness to the marriage of the real
And the imagined, the irrevocable state that none
Has yet returned to speak about.
(The Lost of England, again)
But this state of limbo might be preferable to any escape from it because this chronic ennui is apparently where we wait between the dead who seem to be more alive than the living who seem to be all but dead.
Larkin's empiricism took a reluctant, sceptical attitude but he was capable of finding consolation. O'Brien finds less than that and only celebrates, if celebrate he does, this purgatory. There is no safety net, no redemption to be had. In Nobody's Uncle,
when you step aboard
The shore will slip behind
So swiftly you'll be there before you know.
and The Actuary is, of course, one who deals with financial risk and uncertainty, which for many means assessing how much money he can make out of gambling on when they will die.
And so, in the light of all that, the continuance of the O'Brien theme satirizing and descrying the horrors of residential writing courses is a bit beneath anybody's dignity and needs must be put down as a mere occupational hazard. Either that or simply forego the lucrative fee.
But this is still an excellent book, as good as any since the seminal Ghost Train from the earlier stuff. I'm looking forward soon to a long awaited book by Caitriona O'Reilly but otherwise, I don't know what else will be enjoyed more this year. Because The Beautiful Librarians itself is a word-perfect paragon of love poetry that will stand any amount of re-reading, which is one good way of identifying a great poem. Any poet would surely give much beyond what they could afford to be the author of such a poem done with such apparent facility. There is no gap between the idea and its realization. Some poems look so natural as a result of numerous drafts and much hard work but this looks as if it came in one glorious sweep of composition, which can happen if you're lucky.
I may be wrong. I'm often guilty of that. But I don't close this book feeling as guilty as I thought I might despite needing to say that the best Sean O'Brien, like most of the best poetry, is that which transcends ideology. We do know about that and we share the shame of our inability to do much about it.
The poem that might be even better than the title poem is Cafe de l'imprimerie, which is a kind of reduced villanelle or sestina with its repeated lines keeping us in the same place as we wait with the poet for the liaison who we know is not going to show up,
Your absence is beautiful and wry
And this late summer evening never ends,
Nor does the intolerable
Music, where the truth is cut
With sentiment and surely fatal.
The poem stakes a lot on that 'wry'. But if the whole book is to lead us to any salvation, it must be to the 'untraceable address / Where we will stay forever.'
I can be too 'brand loyal' sometimes with my weighty collection of Gregory Isaacs LP's - not all of which are any good- my thoroughgoing but by no means completist stacks of Thom Gunn, The Magnetic Fields, Maggi Hambling and Philip Larkin but The Beautiful Librarians would be essential even if I didn't have a similarly not quite authoritative cache of Sean O'Brien, for those two last mentioned poems alone.
It is for the sake of reading poems like those that I read poetry at all.