art is all there is and might not be enough
looks like one of those lines deserving, if not destined, to pass into the language. Masterful at his potent best, Sean O'Brien's surely nailed it and, moreover, not for the first time.
But selective quotation does not a scholar make. Poems work as whole poems, not as quotable wisdom strung together by conjunctions, the other bits and syntax.
What it says in Completists, whether or not the R.L. it is 'for' may or not be Maestro Lumsden, is,
for an hour it was beyond dispute
That art is all there is and might not be enough.
Like all those who think that Larkin wrote, What will survive of us is love, which he did but he went to great lengths to qualify it so far that wasn't really there, anybody who thinks that Sean has summed it all up needs to look again and notice that what he offered has already be taken away.
But, there again, if it's not the case that art 'might not be enough', perhaps it is and, for some of us, it might be 'all there is'.
Completists could almost be the masterpiece in Europa but for line 4. About a band that never got beyond a restricted, 'cult' following, 'By accident we saw them live one night',
On a 'short autumn tour' of seaside toilets.
Is that really necessary. They might have been dives. And Prof. O'Brien makes use of more serious vernacular more than dignity might allow without me needing to be either Barbara Cartland or wonder if machismo isn't diminished rather than enhanced by such regular usage. Although such words have become more commonplace with a generation of comedians like Lee Mack or Jonathan Ross superseding the Ken Dodd vintage, they lose their impact exponentially the more they are used and the fact that Larkin used the f word three times, each in a different participle, won't mitigate the offence by reference to a more revered authority.
Europa opens with a wonderful line,
The grass moves on the mass graves
which is as close as a poem might ever get to the smooth wonder of the opening bars of Brahms 4. O'Brien could possibly have been Keats if he had wanted to be but can't let himself, doesn't want to be and why would he.
The blurb tells us,
Europe is not a place we can choose to leave
but whether or not the poems add up to a pro-EU, anti-Leave lament is less clear than the recurrence of mirrors in the poems, making us look at ourselves in the way that the poet has always found us guilty of being ourselves and stuck with it. Although his vision was 'noir' long before it became the staple diet of television drama imported from Scandinavia, it is not clear that he would ever have been anything but a malcontent; much though there may be to be malcontented about.
There is more of a sense of an ending in Europa than the accustomed, ongoing recipe of sinister goings-on, ominous politics and personal alienation but that is autobigraphical, Sabbatical being an understated title for a poem about leaving his old professorial office for perpetuity.
There might not be anything in Europa to put alongside the several major pieces in Ghost Train or such things as the supplicant Beautiful Librarians. But the book maintains the insistent rhythms with which O'Brien has always cast his compelling spell. It is quite possible that any of these poems found in a magazine under an unknown name would alert the reader to a new talent but it is what I might call 'Magnetic Fields Syndrome' - nothing's ever going to be as good as 69 Love Songs, or 'Al Green Syndrome', it will never be 1971-73 again, and even Manchester United don't win every week now that Eric Cantona is elsewhere.
The generation born from 1945-the early 1960's had it all. State-paid-for Liberal Humanities education; The Beatles, Tamla Motown, David Bowie and T. Rex, all the amusement of the cranky avant-garde; the most incredible sense of entitlement and progress being made. And we blew it. Maybe it was circumstances beyond our control but it happened on our watch and we blew it. And it is too late to complain now. Poetry is a very unlikely instrument to use to set it right but it can be a powerful way of resigning oneself to a game that has been played out and gone.
It's a fine book and I wouldn't be without it but future retrospectives might decide to put other of his books ahead of it in estimating which represented the ones he should best be remembered for.