Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party

Sean O'Brien, The Bonfire Party (Picador) 

 

There was a time it seemed to me that once beyond the age of 60, poets either ground to a halt or began repeating themselves. If it's a rule at all it's one of the type that need exceptions to prove it. Exceptions like Sean O'Brien who continues to deliver with rigour and energy.

Some might facetiously suggest that he was always repeating himself but he arrived all but fully-formed with The Frighteners in 1987 and not in much need of 'development' to become the mature version of himself, complete with an armoury of objective correlatives for the perceived declining condition of England.

It's less repetition than resonance as summer is either imminent or on its way out. Afternoons are long and drawn out in an onomatopoeic way. Much needs to be ratified, certificated or established by a higher authority, maybe one of the 'gods' mentioned, and we are still haunted by vestiges of WW2. Otherwise not even language is to be trusted. There are sinister implications in how,

                  the clocks conspired to agree

rather than were synchronized. And the discourse is liberally sprinkled with sometimes esoteric literary references, several of which need looking up.

Early on, Sleepers takes as its text a line from George Orwell about 'the deep, deep sleep of England' which is at least as pertinent now as it was in the 1930's,

                         This couldn't be the end

 

for something we had never thought to lose.

It is deceptively restful while dense with a feeling of detachment and unbelonging. Similarly, in High Summer,

This used to be England

and now it is nowhere. 

This long, somnolent afternoon has dragged on since Somebody Else, in Ghost Train, in 1995. 

Ryan: Rainy Season is more autumnal and somewhat less resigned, longing to 'put off politesse and do some smiting' to the gory extent of putting insect larvae into ears but still,

the world is only ever scenery, a tale,

a line that evokes more than its surface complacency suggests when 'unpacked'. The world, it would appear, is a landscape, or some fiction, we pass through - perhaps as tourists or day-trippers do- without being a part of it.

And, as in The Past, we might look back on the past without finding ourselves there either.

But there might have been a shift in the O'Brien diagnosis of our personal, and communal, malaise. There was a time it was political, inflicted on us by the machinations of how things are run and all the time shown to be our own fault. Now, though,

                                    time's

the evil in the heart of things,

and we are victims of something more metaphysical.

It all remains contingent, precarious and unwinnable. But not necessarily as bleak as it sounds. If Sean's poetic genealogy has Auden as a grandfather and maybe Peter Porter and Douglas Dunn as parents, Larkin is an uncle. Dark with implications though much might be - and the future surely looks darker than Larkin could be expected to have imagined, the sordid sheds, the old crowd in the window seat of the pub and the

gasp of rust

with which the back door of the garage opens are real things offering something more tangible than literature, like the engagement with Jules Maigret in Impasse, and in To Cythera, Juniper and Fingerpost towards the end of the book, the reader is left more transfigured than they had any reason to expect. 

 

Having been one of those who decided the result of last year's Forward Prize, it's unlikely any such committee will be required this year to move O'Brien's tally of them up to four.