Sean O’Brien, Embark

 Sean O’Brien, Embark (Pan Macmillan)

continued from below. I've read it now. Twice through and some bits more than that.

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One day there might be a concordance to the Complete O'Brien that will help establish that words relating mortality and not-being occured more frequently in the later work. He wouldn't be the only one but where we were once alienated or, in fact, 'somebody else', we are no longer even as substantial as that.

Embark arrived as I was midway through Katherine Rundell's recent biography of John Donne (see above, in due course) and with mention of its 'metaphysic' slipped into the summary on the back cover one is tempted towards comparisons with him more than the conventional one with Auden.

Opening with The Desks, we are immediately taken down into familiar subterranean O'Brien territory and faced with an 'examination' that we suspect might have deeper significance than an 'O' level. It's the first but by no means the last time a poem considers leaving towards what might be the next world which was increasingly what concerned Donne. The thesis would include that as well as considering to what extent their poems saw the world through abstractions and 'this life' as a contingent, fleeting thing.

Song looks more like Donne the longer you look at it and in it,

West of the furthest west is set

a single adamantine gate

and on that gate a lock.

but, if that's all there is to it, all there is to do is burn one's books, possess one's soul and wait.

Elsewhere, disposing of books, such worldly ideas as time and place as those represented by the Michelin Guide to Languedoc are

neither here nor there

a friend is remembered for writing of,

the life, the only life,

here between nowhere and never,

and, in The Runners, women running with their dogs are,

   so self-possessed , yet too pre-occupied

with elsewhere and with afterwards to be

entirely present.

 

Formalities, though, finds O'Brien more Larkin-like than he's ever been before in a sonnet re-make of Aubade except,

I and I alone was the disease

 

and then, in Waterworks,

'science shows' that we are the disease

prompts us to read 'dis-ease' not only as illness but being ill at ease in a way that a C17th poet was likely to have expected, I dare say.

I had the benefit of hearing Debussy's Cathedrale engloutie played a few months ago and so had no need to look up that it means 'sunken'. Sean uses the motif twice, alongside a number of other poems that recall his Drowned Book and Waterworks ends with its nightmare being found to be real, as did Thrillers and Cheese thirty years ago. It always looked to me as if Seamus Heaney's last two books went back over his earlier work when he reached and passed 60. Sean's work as he was approaching 70 is doing a similar thing. 

The disposal of the Michelin Guide wouldn't have been the only book that went in that clear-out and Prospero, who did very much the same thing, features in The Island from which this book's title comes in another leavetaking in which it

Has no story left to tell, 

and 

love could hardly matter less,

but it's never clear where we are embarking to go to, only that it will be elsewhere.

 

The bleakness has its own music throughout as well as both the customary rigour and the habits that we have become accustomed to. One would be suspicious of and almost instinctively take exception to a writer re-inventing themselves at 70 but it is to be hoped this isn't quite the valediction it sometimes reads like. I don't imagine Sean to be a devout church-goer in any other sense than Larkin was and so whether God turns out to be the answer as it was for Eliot, Auden and Bob Dylan, I'd leave open to some doubt.

If there are poems in Embark to put alongside those in Ghost Train and the glorious Beautiful Librarians, they might prove to be those saved up for the last three. It's best to start with a good one and end well, too.

The Reader, after Daumier, The Language and Star of Bethlehem provide a gentler finish than any thunderous climax that was best avoided. The book in brief might be summarized in The Language, where,

This dark is light enough to see the slick rain

shining on the slates like an effect

designed by God and yet no more designed

 

than all the nothingness your training 

leads you to infer.

 

And finally, Star of Bethlehem, an in memoriam in which the flower whose 'tiny candour' provides the tender vehicle that 'must be enough' when art, it had been said in Europa was 'all there is and might not be enough'. It's a bit like Auden changing his mind about whether we must love another and/or die. Both poets decided on the more optimistic alternative.