O'BRIEN, Sean

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Nationality: British. Born: London, 19 December 1952. Education: Selwyn College, Cambridge, 1971–74, B.A. in English 1974; Birmingham University, 1975–76, M.A. 1977; Hull University, 1976–79; Leeds University, 1980–81, Post-Graduate Certificate in Education, 1981. Career: Teacher, Beacon School, Crowborough, East Sussex, 1981–89; fellow in creative writing, University of Dundee, 1989–90; founding editor, with Stephen Plaice, The Printer's Devil literary magazine, Brighton, East Sussex, 1990. Awards: Eric Gregory award, 1979; Somerset Maugham award, 1984; Cholmondeley award, 1988. Address: 56 Mafeking Road, Brighton BN2 4EL, East Sussex, England.

Publications

Poetry

The Indoor Park. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1983.

The Frighteners. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1987.

Boundary Beach. Belfast, Ulsterman, 1989.

HMS Glasshouse. Oxford and New York, Oxford University Press, 1991.

A Rarity. Hull, Carnivorous Arpeggio Press, 1993.

Ghost Train. New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.

The Ideology. Huddersfield, Smith/Doorstop, 1997.

Other

Bloody Ambassadors: The Gruesome Stories of Irish People Tried for Murder Abroad. Dublin, Poolbeg, 1993.

The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe, 1995.

Editor, The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945. London, Picador, 1998.

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Critical Studies: Five Irish Writers: The Errand of Keeping Alive by John Hildebidle, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1989; "'Won't You Let Me Take You on a Sea Cruise?': Sean O'Brien's 'H.M.S. Glasshouse'" by Bruce Woodcock, in Bete Noire (Hull, Humberside, England), 12–13, autumn 1991-spring 1992.

Sean O'Brien comments:

It is extremely difficult to comment on my own work. I am particularly interested in history, politics, and place. My early poems drew heavily on Hull, the city where I grew up, and northern loyalties have continued to figure in my work since moving to the south in the early 1980s. That move, coinciding with the embedding of Thatcherism in power, has tended to emphasize the conflicts of culture and class with which Britain is afflicted. The conditions of the 1980s seem to me to have presented poets with a problem that has gone largely unaddressed, that of writing poetry which confronts moral and economic barbarism while remaining art. The successes of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison tend to emphasize their isolation, though the general preference for (at best) oblique relations with political realities is understandable, given the absence of precedent since Auden. In my own experience the largely implicit political concerns of my first book, The Indoor Park, became a good deal more vocal in its successor, The Frighteners, partly through satire and historical reflection but also in the effort to use the resources of fantasy and image to bind the personal and political together. At present my work (for example, in the pamphlet Boundary Beach) finds itself more acquainted with the south, though not reconciled to it, and seems to be pursuing a course at times more inward and less unyielding than before. I would like the poems I write to be dramatic and to work through image rather than discursiveness.

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Sean O'Brien's talent was one of the most notable and promising to emerge in the 1980s. Nearly all of his poetry combines realism and social observation with an element of the highly imaginative, even the fantastic. The combination makes for a quite distinctive style, recognizable even in his earliest published work.

A sense of place is central to O'Brien's verse. In The Indoor Park many poems focus on a conservatory in Pearson Park in Hull, and Boundary Beach, which provides the title of another of his collections, is in Brighton, where he has lived. Both landscapes, however, are symbolic as well as literal. The Hull connection and O'Brien's preoccupations have led to his being called one of "the sons of Dunn." Larkin also is visible as a powerful influence, but so are the more polymorphous gifts of Auden, which show up in O'Brien's predilection for switching between the panoramic view and the telling local detail and in his ability to capture the menacing suggestiveness of something out of view waiting to happen. Like the park and the beach, his other characteristic landscapes are bounded or circumscribed, places of transition, transit, or temporary resort, such as seaside towns and ports—"The dead harbour, the pub and the station buffet."

Out of these settings O'Brien conjures a sense of baffled lives shaped by their time and place. In a belated world loaded with the weight of history and worn-out ideology, people are "condemned to live this script / Until the gestures make you retch." Yet besides this sense of repetitious fixity there is a stress on the provisionality and restlessness of human lives. Traveling stands for the potential to escape, a potential seldom realized as characters "sleep in early restaurants" and "inspect the shipping lists / Until the time is right."

O'Brien believes that poems should be models of the world. This explains his frequent references to maps and atlases seen as magical or suggestive things, for in them empirical signs meet the world of the imagination, suggesting space, scope, and possibility. His imaginative sweeps across the topography of England, with the nighttime full of "slack-jawed insomniacs" and "stoplights rehearsing in private," are strikingly evocative. The poet experiences a startled detachment from his surroundings. His is a world "guilty of itself," one that is a "residue / Of time got wrong, got lost, or not recalled, / Just looking at itself."

English by birth and residence, O'Brien is a keen, even affectionate, student of Englishness, though he has no love for many of the things that have been done in England's name. A major preoccupation is the "insult called / History, that won't pay the rent." People have "waited into age / For history to change its mind," but the personal life and even love remain shaped by a disabling past—invisible decades / Of rain, domestic love and failing mills / … Are fading into what we are: two young / Polite incapables." Not only the individual but language too becomes recruited to purposes beyond itself, as words finish up "strapped to the big wheel of syntax." The poems in the first section of The Frighteners, "In a Military Archive," use the relics of war and war's impact on the lives of children as metaphors for the inherited weight of the past that bears down upon people instructed to "try to think of history as home." But the brutalities of war are shown as continuing into the present, for these poems merge into others witty and acidic that blast the southern English Tory complacencies and hypocrisies of the 1980s and confront with real passion and authority questions such as police attitudes or the miners' strike.

Most of O'Brien's poems are as fully loaded with images as he can make them, but they often avoid top-heaviness by being conceived as living speech, which in The Frighteners is often fiercely demotic. At times the richness of his imagination becomes cryptic and inscrutable, but the clarity of his best images is shining. Occasionally there is something like Raine's Martian manner, in phrases such as "Chestnut trees / Are fire-damaged candelabra" or "The goldfish … rehearsing blasé vowels at the sun." But the resemblance is superficial. Where the Martian mode can be reactionary, inviting us to refresh a sense of wonder at, and hence to acquiesce in, things as they actually are, O'Brien evokes a convincing sense of astonishment that we could ever have allowed things to get this way. Like his character Ryan, who "was born expecting something quite different," O'Brien remarks that "all this is England, / Just left here, and what's to be done?"

—R.J.C. Watt