Books of the Month

'The Drowned Book' by Sean O'Brien

Sean O'Brien's latest collection has a decidedly damp feel. Here are poems about 'River-doors', 'Water-Gardens', 'Drains', and assorted waterways, lakes, boats, lighthouses and snow. Don't be fooled into thinking this is a restful poetic exploration of watery scenery though. O'Brien's waterways are often murky, subterranean, municipal, and threatening. Sometimes, as in 'Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins', they're dangerous too:

They were polio rivers, street-long

Inch-deep stinks with one black fish,

[...]

         at the road the water slid

For thirty feet between the culvert's jaws,

And came out in a different light.

O'Brien never simply looks at water from above: it always has two sides, and frequently he steps through dimensions and describes an alternative world. In 'Water-Gardens', 'Water looked up through the lawn / Like a half-buried mirror', and in 'River-Doors' the metaphor becomes explicit, water becoming a fluid door into a different reality. In a pub the landlord tells how 'The river revisits his cellar, / Caressing the chains of the exciseman's ghost / Where he swings between this world and the water's'.

There's also a lot of elegy in The Drowned Book, with several moving pieces written in memory of fellow poets. But there's a harder, political tone too, as in 'Valedictory', a bitter farewell to a former prime minister:

Let the histories receive

This lady, who did not believe

In treating with the TUC,

In guff about 'society',

            In turning.

Bid farewell to one who knew

Precisely what the world should do

In every case, without remorse,

And let her lie, unless of course

            She's burning

In all, it's a dark collection, concerned with other worlds and after lives - hardly surprising from the poet who's last book was a verse translation of Dante's Inferno. But, not only because it recently won the Forward Prize (the third time O'Brien has taken the award), it's well worth a close and quiet read. Preferably, in a warm, dry place.

Susan Tranter

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