Sean O'Brien, Otherwise (Dare-Gale Press)
Sean O'Brien has been beset by similar 'black dogs' (Siberian Birch, here, p. 15, l. 15) and the later O'Brien line that,
art is all there is and might not be enough
has been quoted at DGBooks often enough to demonstrate that it made a deep impression.
I've spent more time than is usual before dashing down some first impressions about this batch of new Sean poems, not only because he is one of the diminishing number of poets whose work I care about but also because I'd like to gauge, or perhaps even calibrate, to what extent some consolation has been made available even if when the word occurs (again on p.15 but at l. 24), it is by no means a given thing.
Siberian Birch, the poem on page 15, is already ostensibly a candidate for the status of 'stand-out' poem among these and maybe that ongoing litany of memorable events that began in Ghost Train if not before and continued through The Beautiful Librarians. The consolation is love, not only within the shared experience of time as it is,
still in the kitchen, still watching the clock
but 'archived in this way'.
Time is the main character in Otherwise. The past is always present and the present is for the most part a 'nowhere' suspended between then and passages that lead elsewhere, not always promisingly.
Time is awake, the great insomniac,
and we are time, eaten and eating
as time eats,
where 'we' and 'time' could be mistaken for Mike Yarwood doing an impersonation of Crow but where a previous Sean's version of that might have made us 'guilty of being ourselves' and taken it on as a political issue in attritional or rebarbative, combative bad humour, the idea might have transferred into a neighbouring but different key that is neither resigned or accepting but more resonant and truer.
These poems begin in light, and with water, in the rare music of Blue Window in which, even though 'about to edit Ugolino's table-talk', one of the damned souls in the Inferno,
the breaking wave's a blessing
nothing warrants, breaking none the less.
Sleepers refers us back to 1930's Spain via a quote from George Orwell, the long-standing political imperatives that England has had a track record of preferring to sleep through, whether it was Boris, football or climate change. Bodies is a metaphysical meditation on a mirror that has itself forgotten what it saw but that doesn't allow those that it saw forget quite so completely.
Like those old compilers of LP's always knew, you start and finish with your best stuff and begin side two with a good one, too. Otherwise is the title track and finale, its snowfall unmistakeably bringing to mind The Dead at the end of Dubliners in which the past casts such a shadow over its present and which is, officially, the greatest prose fiction in the language.
Sean is replete with knowledge of Eng Lit and it would come as some surprise if the echo isn't intentional. Some of us are as much drenched in other writing as we are in our own lives and it never stops re-echoing. Sean is empirical in liking to quote some authority for what he says, whether as in when he takes things on trust, as what 'wise man say' or 'as formerly supposed' but literature is to be depended on, too. To Cythera is an in memoriam that might remind some readers of Don Paterson's Rain in its beginning and possibly Paul Muldoon's Incantata by the end.
While laboriously, but not unwillingly, going through the motions of compiling C20th, the working title of a nonchalant survey of that period's poetry in English, it has dawned on me that the generation of poets born in the early 1950's are a sensible suggestion to put up against any received wisdom that those writing in 1917, 1938 or maybe 1955 were any greater. A tough but talented midfield of Donaghy, Muldoon and O'Brien wouldn't be easy to break down,
still snow as someone in the other life
might seek to represent it, a creation
waiting for a god and neither
ending nor beginning, only falling.
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