SEAN O'BRIEN

 Photo: Caroline Forbes

Sean O'Brien has written short stories, plays and essays, but is best known as a poet. He has won the Forward Prize for Best Collection a record three times, most recently with his collection The Drowned Book. Find out more about Sean's work at the Contemporary Writers website.

This interview took place in November 2007, and includes questions from EnCompass readers and Reader in Residence Susan Tranter.

Susan Tranter: Sean, may I start by asking what you've been reading lately? Anything you'd recommend to EnCompass readers?

Sean O'Brien: I've been reading a good deal of fiction. The most interesting contemporary novel I've read lately is Castorp, by the Polish novelist Pavel Huelle. It's a strange comic prequel to Thomas Mann's masterpiece The Magic Mountain. Otherwise I've been reading some Henry James stories, such as 'The Figure in the Carpet; and 'The Jolly Corner', as well as various things by Balzac, including Colonel Chabert and Lost Illusions, plus Graham Robb's terrific biography of Balzac. Also Melville's Bartleby. As to poetry, I've been admiring Frances Leviston's first collection, Public Dream. And Frederick Ahl's new translation of the Aeneid is pretty good, I think.

Lilias: I'm enjoying The Drowned Book, and I've been rereading 'Lost Song of the Apparatus'. Can you tell me a bit more about what prompted you to write the poem, why you shaped it like this, and whether some of it is 'found' from other sources? (I don't want much, do I..?)

Sean O'Brien: I'm glad you're enjoying the poem, Lilias. Yes, the material of 'Lost Song of the Apparatus' is found - partly from a book on old Scottish railways, partly from a school edition of Virgil's Georgics. I wanted to see what would happen when these apparently remote materials were juxtaposed. The result seems to be a mixture of the comic and the melancholy.

Anu: I'd like to ask Sean how he came by the watery theme for his latest collection - was it an ongoing preoccupation, or something that's developed out of other projects?

Sean O'Brien: Some years back I wrote a number of poems called 'Rivers', a joint project with John Kinsella and Peter Porter, who took up the theme in their own very different ways. The landscape of the north side of the River Humber has always been very present to me - a sort of founding landscape, I suppose. It's low-lying, partly reclaimed from the water. The wateriness of the book is also, I think, connected to working on Dante - the rivers of Hell.

David R: What made you decide to tackle Dante, and why did you think a new version of the Inferno was needed?

Sean O'Brien: 'Oh reason not the need!' as King Lear puts it. I felt like it. I hoped to make a readable version. Some of the professorial verse versions end up with a language whose relationship to English is very tormented, and I wanted to avoid that if I could, as well as to suggest the poem's momentum.

Sara: Sean, when you do verse translations, do you start from an in-depth knowledge of the language, or is it possible to work from other translations? Are you planning any more translated work in future?

Sean O'Brien: I worked with a dictionary, commentaries and parallel prose translations. I also had the constant guidance of the distinguished poet and translator Alistair Elliot. I'll be moving on to the Purgatorio.

Oko: I would be interested to know how much of a community of poets there is in the UK ? Do people know each other and read each other's work and help out, or is it very competitive?

Sean O'Brien: Both are true, I think, Oko, - the mutual respect and the competitiveness.

DBT99: Congratulations to Sean for his recent win of the Forward Prize. How does he feel to have won three times? Do prizes make a difference to him?

Sean O'Brien: Many thanks. I was completely taken aback to find I'd won it again. Prizes are enjoyable insofar as they may attract new readers. And obviously the unexpected cheque is very helpful - though I notice that its arrival tends to be followed very swiftly by the need to prevent some part of the house from falling down.

Michael Hunter: I noticed that there were quite a few elegies in The Drowned Book. Is the elegy just one of those timeless forms, or is there something about the times we're living in which makes it especially apt?

Sean O'Brien: There's an interesting new book on this, Elegy by David Kennedy. I do think elegy is a permanent form. Whether we're in a particularly elegiac phase now is hard to say, though the omens for the planet as a whole are pretty grim. In the case of The Drowned Book, several friends and fellow poets died much too young in the same couple of years during its composition, and I wanted to honour and remember them.

Shayla: Sean, I would like to know who have been your poetic masters, your sources of inspiration, throughout your career?

Sean O'Brien: Shakespeare, Eliot, Auden, Marvell, Wallace Stevens, Rilke, Zbigniew Herbert, Douglas Dunn, Peter Porter, Ken Smith, Louis Simpson, Derek Mahon, Edward Lear and many many others!

PY: I understand Sean has written plays as well as poetry, and I'd be interested to know how a writer moves between these two media - do they detract from, or cross-fertilise, each other?

Sean O'Brien: I don't find that the two tasks interfere with each other, PY, except, of course, that there's never enough time to do everything you want to do. I think my poems have always been interested in the dramatic possibilities of language  - that is, seeking a way of giving a three-dimensional experience - so that plays are in one sense a natural extension of that. Plays also offer the benefit of scale - if, for example, you're interested in history and politics, which I am. My plays are normally in verse, except for radio adaptations of novels.

Susan Tranter: Thanks again Sean for taking part in this interview. May I ask what you're working on at the moment, or what's coming up next for you?

Sean O'Brien: Thanks for asking me to take part, Susan. At the moment I'm working on new poems, a book of short stories and a novel. I’ll also be moving on to the Purgatorio and a new stage play.

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