Sean O'Brien, Juniper

Sean O'Brien, Juniper (Dare-Gale Press)

'Haberdashery' is a good word to have in a poem with its natural percussion and domestic associations but one might not get away with using it more than once. I thought Sean O'Brien had used it before but, with no concordance available, failed to find it in his previous work. It was used in an unconvincing Pastiche O'Brien on this website on 3/12/2009, though, and so art eventually imitates its own poor imitator and if its use in Amnesia, the poem here, is Sean's first then I saw it coming a long way off whether I knew what it really meant or not.

In Amnesia, the sundry goods are the subject of some of those now faded advertisements painted on end-of-terrace houses in,

Entire districts where the poor had fought and lost

for generations out of mind could not be found at all.  

We experience this leftover feeling in the city as 'the merely dead' and death or the dead are explicitly referred to in all but one of these thirteen poems and are at least implied in the other but alongside madness and rain and themes of such exclusion and lack of understanding, they are only really a sub-category of the over-riding theme of time.

In The Goodbye Look, 

    time's the evil in the heart of things, 

in which we have to live while it wears us out. It is always in language in verb tenses, it can't be gainsaid. Such was the idea in my own first ever poem in print but it's taken until now, and Sean's new poems, to realize that it is the overwhelming theme of all literature and life. If he has dealt in weather gods, river gods and other pagan gods at times, time is the genuine almighty.

A feature of the O'Brien technique is how he can let sentences extend and then extend further and in Peacetime one of them lasts for ten mostly 10, 12 or 14 syllable lines. That's plenty, one might think, but it demonstrates the point that while time is forever disappearing it can also drag as anyone who has gone from Portsmouth to Newcastle and back on a coach would understand.

The weight of time accumulates behind us and we call it history, or as much of its wars and brave attempts at making something of it as our amnesia allows to be preserved.

Juniper here is a small place near Hexham rather than a flavouring for gin. The title poem is in memoriam the artist Birtley Aris, a friend as Fingerposts, an even more recent poem recently heard on the TLS podcast, is for another. That had led me to anticipate a mellower, gentler, perhaps less combative O'Brien. Keats was writing Late Keats at the age of 25 but, for all we know, Sean might still be writing middle-period O'Brien in his early seventies but I suspect the discomfiting 'attitude' might not abate. Only time will tell.