Sean O'Brien, Impasse

 Sean O'Brien, Impasse, for Jules Maigret (Hercules Editions) 

It is said to be a 'good fit' when a football club appoints a new manager who is thought to match any personality the club is perceived to have. What are usually being fitted together, though, are how much the club are able to pay and the wage requirements of the manager. A much better fit are the poems of Sean O'Brien and the fiction of Georges Simenon.

Ennui is not an exclusively French thing but they have the best word for it. It will have been noticed, not only by me, that it is the prevailing mood of much of Sean O'Brien's poetry. The melancholy of Maigret and the seedy sidestreets of the arrondissements are further elements the two writers have in common, enhanced by a tendency Sean has of looking towards Europe in the hope it might provide somewhere preferable to post-war, post-Thatcher, post-Larkin England. But perhaps the most significant way that these poems are a 'homage and a transposition' of Simenon is how,

crime takes us to the unknowable part of ourselves,

as Patrick McGuinness puts it in his introduction. Murder, evil and that 'unknowable part' are here another of those underworlds that recur in O'Brien's work, from his accounts of the condition of England in his poems, the gothic darkness of the short stories or his version of Dante's Inferno itself.

I read a Maigret novel ahead of the arrival of this booklet, as homework. I had long meant to anyway so I was glad of having a good reason. It didn't seem as dark as the Rowan Atkinson adaptations but I noticed that Maigret is a large man whereas Rowan isn't. I'm also handicapped by never being sure in mysteries if it's a mystery to me because it's meant to be or because I've missed the point. And so, as in Midsomer Murders, I wait to see what happens and enjoy the ambience.

And the ambience is mostly what Sean is writing about. Not much adjustment has had to be made to make him a natural inheritor of Maigret's world. In his Afterword, Sean at least puts up the idea that Impasse is a 'sequence', though. I suffer from a rare condition that is a horror of the poem sequence for which German, in its turn, might have a word. Perhaps the poems are sequential and belong together which in my terminology makes Impasse the poem and the dozen parts of it chapters that aren't meant to stand alone.

There is some scene setting before,

In this moment it is clear a death 

will be required if the journey's to continue.

And then there is a corpse before an inconclusive ending.

 

There is an erotic sub-plot, too, though, from,

the facts alone cannot explain desire     

to

when loss and desire are spent like lovers

by way of 

                       Que reste-t-il

de nos amours?

and, at the risk of finding more than is actually there,

                      There follows

an exasperated huff of steam, and next

the brutal crash and ring of couplings.

 

If there is narrative to be found in Impasse it might be something of a departure in Sean's poems. There are two novels, two books of short stories and plays so he's not averse to a plot as such but the poems are more often about stasis and not much happening.

What at first looked like pastiche, possibly an exercise indulging a private enthusiasm, soon began to look like something more. I don't necessarily need to know. I don't want poetry to be about final answers. If it's anything at all, it aspires to the condition of music and does best when it gets closest.