Sean O’Brien, Embark

Sean O’Brien, Embark (Pan Macmillan)

First of all it’s pop music that moves on and leaves you behind, then it’s sport. They begin to look like young people’s games. I’m sure it’s not their fault so it must be mine but I didn’t foresee it happening with contemporary poetry by which one could once set one’s bearings. But if the days of my collection of 1990’s Poetry Reviews now seem like a Golden Age, there are still a handful of poets whose new books are an occasion and Sean O’Brien is central among them.

The pre-release, promotional paragraph here,

Embark 

doesn’t leave a reviewer much to add because that has long been the case and it continues to be.

There are a few poets (Elizabeth Bishop, Derek Mahon, Norman MacCaig) whose books one can open at any page confident of finding a faultless poem. There is another category (Auden, Hughes and maybe even Eliot) who had periods in their lives when they wrote better poems than at others. A third type spread their masterpieces almost from their beginnings throughout their lives (Thom Gunn, and possibly Larkin and Heaney although they almost qualify for the first group). Sean O’Brien is one of this last group who provide unforgettable highlights at their best. I’m still regretting not having made more of that first line of Europa,

The grass moves on the mass graves

that I might first have suspected of some verbal playfulness but has haunted me, on and off, ever since. The only rule out of all those that have been offered about poetry is that it first of all needs to be a piece of writing in which the line ends are decided by the author and not the compositor but it should also remain with you, in the unlikely event that it’s any good.

Familiarity with an artist’s work makes it harder to evaluate it against that of others when comparison with the rest of their own work is so difficult to avoid. Beethoven 4 would be much highly regarded if it didn’t come in between 3, 5 and 6. Embark is the only book of new poems I’ve bought this year, there not having been any by John Burnside, Julia Copus or the few others I’d look out for and so I can’t be sure it’s in a class of its own among this year’s releases but it is in as far as it’s the only one that’s been trusted with being given the chance. We must be due a report in The Observer announcing a new renaissance in English poetry, they come round with the regularity of a planet on an astrolabe, but you don’t have to believe all one reads in the papers and it might just be a few gatherings among a new generation who think they’re the first to make a break with tradition and be the new young guns.

We might all have thought we were that once but Sean O’Brien was never one for such vogues. Art does well to respect the tradition it owes a debt to and aspires to become a part of. Even Ezra Pound, for all the shift in taste he engineered, did that - more than most - and O’Brien takes part willingly in the aspects of the discipline he sees fit to adopt.

Those that one remembers becoming the inheritors of that tradition are the Old Guard sooner than one cares to notice. Sandy Denny never did find out where all the time went. Much of the old Northern Powerhouse that included Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn amongst others for who compromise wasn’t their first preference have gone quiet leaving Sean the last remaining that we might think ‘major’ but Embark came through the letterbox a few minutes ago so I’d better read it.

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