Sean O'Brien, Hammersmith (Hercules Editions)It was a CD-sized package but was too flexible to contain a disc. I couldn't think what it might be and so had to resort to opening it to find out.
This signed, limited edition, collector's item is compact but well produced but possibly for the likes of me who are not completists of their favourite artists but like to have most of it. It can stand alongside the 1997 edition of The Ideology. I am grateful to Sean for not exploiting the market for such items by issuing the number of luxury books that are detailed in Ted Hughes' letters or providing the same sort of shock as when I rang Enitharmon many years ago to ask the price of Thom Gunn's In the Twilight Slot. This neat artefact costs ten pounds but most general readers can probably look forward to seeing the poem collected in a future, fuller volume, with more than these two cantos.
Sean takes his three-line stanzas from Dante but it isn't terza rima exactly as he only rhymes when he sees fit. Although we might feel we are in familiar O'Brien territory in these poems, the schlerosis of contemporary Britain, as he sees it, the sense of loss, of a world gone to bad in mundane places, it is here specifically Hammersmith, where his mother and father met, and not any provinicial outpost of England that is synecdochically representative of all of it. If we immediately recognize a painting by Hieronymous Bosch from its panorama of tortured monsters in a hellish nightmare canvas then we equally know Sean for these depictions of post-Thatcher, post-Beeching England. As he explains in the foreword, the poem comes from the same source as the brilliant Elegy from the November collection, which where he first wrote about his mother.
If Hammersmith is still haunted by the days when her generation experienced something 'with a strange resemblance to happiness', it is now where,
The pub that was fading, then boarded, then sold,
Too far from the river, to far from the shops,
An in-between place where the calendar stops,
but one wonders, and thinks back over the complete O'Brien oeuvre, if happiness is always something attributed to the past and if it would have been so then and so is forever fugitive. The foreword is not the first time he has referred to the Boat Race as representative of a bygone world, begging the question about quite how idyllic that was. And there, too, were John Snagge and Stafford Cripps.
This lament is classical, an echo of Ubi Sunt poems, but the more specific it is made in Hammersmith, the more we have to wonder if that is what Sean would have felt like whatever period he had lived or if it is more generally an essential part of the human condition.
The photographs, ostensibly converted to black and white, that accompany the poems feature few human figures. I was once told that photographers like to get a person into a picture to give it some context but, on tyhe other hand, one photographer's maxim is presumably another one's anathema. The effect in Sean's pictures is a kind of grey abstraction, of form, shapes, tangle but ultimately of absence. He is there, reflected back to his own camera in a mirror, the flash going off. I don't think it's significant enough to spend time trying to make it so.
For my own part, I idolize 1971 but, on the day that I land the first leg of my optimistic treble, that charges would not be brought against Cliff Richard, I note that the odds against the other two legs have diminished. It is beginning to look for the first time that the UK might vote to leave the European Union and the odds against Donald Trump being president of the USA are also shorter than they ought to be.
I had thought that however much I relish the idea of the past, frozen and untouchable as it is for us, that the present must be better. Our ancestors were quaint and thus loveable and so were the times they lived in. But not having Diana Ross or T. Rex at number one is compensated for by the internet, CD's or Victoria Coren. It might depend on the outcome of the second and third legs of the treble whether we want to share Sean's nostalgia wholesale or merely sympathize.
But his point is also that the perceived dereliction of the world he came from, our natural interest in the ancestry that defines us, is one more thing lost that will never come back. If that is to be regretted, it was ever thus.
