Collected Poems
By Sean O'Brien
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About this ebook
Sean O'Brien
Sean O’Brien’s poetry has received numerous awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize (three times), the E.M Forster Award and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. Europa is his ninth collection. His work has been published in several languages. His novel Once Again Assembled Here was published in 2016. He is also a critic, editor, translator, playwright and broadcaster. Born in London, he grew up in Hull. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pleased with this collection of poems as I have always liked her work and enjoyed The World's Wife.
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Collected Poems - Sean O'Brien
Collected Poems
To Gerry Wardle
Contents
The Indoor Park (1983)
The Snowfield
Walking
Air
Station Song
Le Départ
The Park by the Railway
Stories
Anne-Marie, the Flower Girl
Victorians
The Disappointment
The Police
The Name
The Brochure
Clio
William Ryan’s Song in July
In the Head
Jazz
For Lowell George
The Beat Goes On
The Next Meeting
Midsummer’s Eve
Not Sending Cards this Year
The Widower
The Seaside Specialist
Gun Law
Heatwave
Late
Quiet Wedding
The Lamp
Tides
Victims
From the Narrator’s Tale
Two Finger Exercise
The Captain’s Pipe
The Amateur God
The Frighteners (1987)
In a Military Archive
The Dampers
Young Howard
A Master
The Realists
Civilians
Summertime
The Red Hospital
The Allotment
Trespass
Song of the South
Unregistered
Terra Nova
London Road
The Mechanical Toy Museum
How Ryan Got His Start in Life
Ryan at Home
Ryan’s Vocation
Ryan’s Rebirth
Ryan and the Life to Come
Ryan’s Farewell
Envoi
After This Poem
Cousin Coat
The Yard
Fiction and the Reading Public
In Madre Maria
A Matinee
Kingdom of Kiev, Rios das Muertes
The Head Man
Geography
HMS Glasshouse (1991)
Before
Thrillers and Cheese
In the Other Bar
Hatred of Libraries
A Donegal Golfer
Entertainment
Propaganda
Boundary Beach
The Brighton Goodbye
At the Wellgate
Mission Impossible
Dundee Heatwave
Fishing
Notes on the Use of the Library (Basement Annexe)
In Residence: A Worst Case View
Betweentimes
HMS Glasshouse
Cold
On the Piss
From the Whalebone
Working on the Railway
Serious
Naughty Ron
Ballad of the Lit and Phil
An Ordinary Evening in New Holderness
A Corridor
To the Unknown God of Hull and Holderness
After Laforgue
Ghost Train (1995)
Somebody Else
Revenants
Interior
Special Train
The Politics Of
Autumn Begins at St James’s Park, Newcastle
A Rarity
The All-Night Afternoon
Rain
Poem Written on a Hoarding
Essay on Snow
House
Of Origins
Latinists
AWOL
No One
Valentine
Railway Songs
A Provincial Station
The Middle
A Secret
Le Voyage
Paysage
Homework
Biographer
Something to Read on the Train
Cantona
Paradise
On Not Being Paul Durcan
Reading Stevens in the Bath
Amours de Grimsby
R=U=B=R=I=C
Downriver (2001)
Welcome, Major Poet!
Acheron, Phlegethon, Styx
Nineties
The Ideology
At the Gate
The Eavesdroppers
Last Orders at the Fusilier, Forest Hall
Ravilious
A Northern Assembly
Baltica
Riding on the City of New Orleans
Indian Summer
Kanji
The Grammar School Ghost
Cities
Songs from the Drowned Book
Songs from the Black Path
Beginning
The Iron Hand
Lament
Songs from Downriver
On a Blue Guitar (Lulu Banks)
Horizontal (Bobby Smart)
Smoke Signals (Bobby Smart and Sailor Chorus)
Time on yer Beer Now (The Company)
from Sports Pages
Proem
The Origins of Sport from Ancient Times
The Olympics
Football! Football! Football!
Amerika
Noonday
Lines on Mr Porter’s Birthday
Postcards to the Rain God
Synopsis
Ex Historia Geordisma
from The Go-As-You-Please Songbook
from The Poems of Mercedes Medioca
Seriously, Like
Poem for a Psychiatric Conference
The Railway Sleeper
The Genre: A Travesty of Justice
From Inferno (2006)
Canto III, The Entry to Hell
Canto VIII, Crossing the Styx
Canto XIII, The Wood of the Suicides
Canto XVII, Geryon; the Usurers
Canto XXII, Escape
Canto XXV, Snakes and Metamorphoses
Canto XXVI, Ulysses
Canto XXXIII, Ugolino
From The Drowned Book (2007)
Dedication
The Apprehension
Water-Gardens
River-doors
Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins
By Ferry
Drains
A Coffin-Boat
The River in Prose
The Mere
The River Road
Three Lighthouses
Grey Bayou
The Lost War
Timor Mortis
Sheol
A Little Place They Know
Symposium at Port Louis
Proposal For a Monument to the Third International
Valedictory
Fantasia on a Theme of James Wright
The Thing
Thom Gunn
Serious Chairs
Three Facetious Poems
Sung Dynasty
Why The Lady
Of Rural Life
Lost Song of the Apparatus
Six Railway Poems for Birtley Aris
Inheritance
Cherchez la Femme
Yellow Happiness
Bridge
Reasonable Men
Here You Are
Railway Hotel
Grimshaw
Rose
Blue Night
Transport
Abendmusik
The Hand
After Rilke: To Hölderlin
Praise of a Rainy Country
Blizzard
Arcadia
From November (2011)
Fireweed
Jeudi Prochain
The Citizens
Sunk Island
Salisbury Street
Josie
Vérité: Great Junction Street
Cahiers du Cinema
White Enamel Jug
Sleep
Europeans
Elegy
The Lost Book
Novembrists
Counting the Rain
The Plain Truth of the Matter
First Time Around
Sunday in a Station of the Metro
Marine Siding
Closed
The Island
Railway Lands
Infernal
Bruges-la-Morte
The Drunken Boat
Michael
The Landing-Stage
Dinner at Archie’s
Porteriana
Leavetaking
The Heat of the Day
Tables and Chairs
Aspects of the Novel
Chapter 16
Want of Motive
The Uninvited Reader
The River on the Terrace
Narbonne
On the Toon
Canto I
Canto II
Canto III
Notes
Index of Titles
Index of First Lines
Acknowledgements
The Indoor Park
(1983)
The Snowfield
It is so simple, being lonely.
It’s there in the silence you make
To deny it, the silence you make
To accuse the unwary, the frankly alone.
In the silence you bring to a park
When you go there to walk in the snow
And you find in the planthouse,
Next to the orchids in winter slow-motion
And sleeping unreadable mosses,
Sick men, mad, half-born, who are sitting
As long as the afternoon takes.
Left there by helpers hours ago,
As if preparing for a test,
Each holds a book he cannot open.
Some days you put together
Sentences to say for them
As you leave to go back to the street.
With work they might be epigrams
Of love and modest government.
And this thought frees you. You pick up the paper.
You eat. Or you go to the library and talk.
But some days there is nothing
You cannot know. You still leave,
But it seems to take hours, labouring
Back to the street through the snowdrifts
And not worth the effort.
It seems that this is all there is.
It happens like snow in a park, seen clearly
After days of admiration, and looking
As if it had always been there, like a field
Full of silence, that is not beginning or ending.
It is so simple. You just hadn’t looked.
And then you did, and couldn’t look away.
Walking
I am in love with detail. Chestnut trees
Are fire-damaged candelabra.
Waterbirds are porcelain.
The planthouse is the room within the room
And all this is England,
Just left here, and what’s to be done?
It does not remember the dances,
Silk stockings and murders and money.
We were not invited. We came late
To trespass on ourselves among the furniture,
Admiring the upholstery of Hell,
Where the talk is the best and you know it.
Adulterous cortège of cars around the park,
Where the couples are solving themselves with despair.
They will die of each other.
They have names, they were born –
If they’re held to the light they have souls,
Like little ingots knocking at the heart.
O Vaughan and Geoffrey, Annabel and Jane,
Your time is up, you’ve gone professional.
You are condemned to live this script
Until the gestures make you retch,
And then for ever, knowing it –
The passive yes, the nominated self,
The grammar till it vanishes
Among these great facilities,
Where she and I are walking, I believe.
We’re holding hands. I say, and then repeat,
There is no nightmare big enough to hurt,
Since it fits with the tick of the gold at my heart.
Air
I shall be writing you until I die,
You in your several selves, my friend of half a life,
My girl, my enemy, my judge.
An empire of affection built in air:
The air remains, the context of At Last.
It fills the space between the lives with words –
The last of everyone, through Caesar, Janis, Marx
And Ron McKernan, and from each
A democratic breath of silence
As helpful and useless as drink.
They died, and we diminished proteans
Have died as well, in every second thought.
We drew the map, and gave the place its names
Of water, light, and grass for lying on,
That single summer, standing at its heart.
—We didn’t. We were not ourselves.
Nor are we now, when we’ve concluded
Every variant of hate.
We named each tic of sentiment, or not.
It’s called The Oxford Book of Early Life,
And here’s the long, uneasy supplement
That cannot trust its sources. Air,
And we can only add to it
Our passionate routine,
In case our scholarship should yield
The facts of how we lived and felt
And breathed the air behind the air.
Station Song
I should have seen you all the time, you ghosts,
But I was taken up elsewhere
With getting on, which got me here.
I’m back for good. You are
So patient, like the best of hosts.
Am I your guest?
The girl, is she one too?
You say there’s nothing I must do,
That I am not accountable to you.
You wish me nothing but the best.
I try to see if I’ll get lost.
I walk the streets. But then a sign
Propped up on bricks explains what’s mine:
One door along this line
Of doors that open on to dust.
Le Départ
You’ve been leaving for years and now no one’s surprised
When you knock to come in from the weather.
The crew is past embarrassment:
They can live with their nautical names, and with yours.
So sit, take down your glass, and talk
Of all that is not you, that keeps you here
Among the sentimental stevedores
In the drinking clubs in the dank afternoons
Of your twenty-ninth year. There may be news.
Indeed. Somebody drowned last night, walked sideways
Off a Polish fishmeal hulk. A rabid Paraguayan bear
Was seen among the kindly hookers eating fruit.
A hand-carved coelacanth was found
When the cells were dug out to lay drains . . .
How can you not be struck by these arrivals?
The perfect boat is sailing Tuesday week.
It’s heading southwards, way beyond the ice –
Starsailing seems quite plausible by night.
Until then there is querulous Ninepin
(The loss of his ticket for thieving)
And Madeleine’s never-secret grief
(Be kind, and ask politely what)
And someone selling crocodiles
And hash from the sump of a jungle . . .
Now even the Juvaro have secret accounts –
Sell them your Service Forty-Five
And get a tape-recorder back . . .
The Amazon’s an answering service:
No one’s ever really lost. A month ago
Rocheteau, stuck for credit, offered up
The pelvic bones of Mungo Park
In exchange for a fifth of Jim Beam . . .
We always thought that Scot was lying about Africa.
It is easily night: soft boom of lighter-boats
Beyond the fogwall, swung on inauthentic tides
That left you here, that left you here
As the lovesongs go over the warehouse
Among patrolling cats and a lost ARP
With his bucket of sand and his halberd.
You are doped on the stairs on the way to the moon
With Yvonne, who has aged but not quite,
Who knows the words to every song
And places one flattering palm on your spine
Till you move, who keeps a special bottle
For you (but half gone, half gone) by the bed,
A black fire of sugar that says all there is
About travelling. You’re halfway there.
And all shall sing until the awful morning
Reminds them of themselves,
Then sleep in early restaurants,
Boastful of such daft endurance,
And then inspect the shipping lists
Until the time is right.
‘You talk in your sleep,’ says Yvonne.
‘So I woke you. All this travelling –
You leave the girls for what?
Are we not always, always travelling?
Let’s drink to that, and one before you go.’
The Park by the Railway
Where should we meet but in this shabby park
Where the railings are missing and the branches black?
Industrial pastoral, our circuit
Of grass under ash, long-standing water
And unimportant sunsets flaring up
Above the half-dismantled fair. Our place
Of in-betweens, abandoned viaducts
And modern flowers, dock and willowherb,
Lost mongrels, birdsong scratching at the soot
Of the last century. Where should we be
But here, my industrial girl? Where else
But this city beyond conservation?
I win you a ring at the rifle range
For the twentieth time, but you’ve chosen
A yellow, implausible fish in a bag
That you hold to one side when I kiss you.
Sitting in the waiting-room in darkness
Beside the empty cast-iron fireplace,
In the last of the heat the brick gives off,
Not quite convinced there will be no more trains,
At the end of a summer that never began
Till we lost it, we cannot believe
We are going. We speak, and we’ve gone.
You strike a match to show the china map
Of where the railways ran before us.
Coal and politics, invisible decades
Of rain, domestic love and failing mills
That ended in a war and then a war
Are fading into what we are: two young
Polite incapables, our tickets bought
Well in advance, who will not starve, or die
Of anything but choice. Who could not choose
To live this funeral, lost August left
To no one by the dead, the ghosts of us.
Stories
‘You can, now that she’s qualified.
Let nothing distract you,’ he said.
We drank tea in the visiting hour
As if at our own kitchen table.
‘Just go, the two of you.’ As if we might
Transform your van into a house,
Add river, pasture, children
In one summer, forgetting ourselves
In the country he came from.
I thought he came from Nenagh.
No, he played football for them.
It’s been Dublin, Cork and Limerick
And still he won’t stop travelling.
‘See, Cork is for strangers: it’s short in the mouth
So it calls off the questions. But go.
A woman will console a man.’
Suppose we did. He’d never come.
A bad third novel in the sticks
With him wanting tea at all hours
And you delivering the dead,
He left the place. It’s stories now
And they sustain no time, no life.
I’ve come so far from land I’d drown.
Anne-Marie, the Flower Girl
It could be true. There might just be
No outcome. After all the beds,
The halls with unusual prints,
The sculleries with mould that climbs
From teapots, all the headless birds
Left over by the cats, the years
Of unstoppable weather
You would think by now
She might have grown a bit suspicious.
So all the long-haired boys have gone
To India at last, but she
Keeps busy making things to sell.
The one she always wanted lives
Across the street. She hardly hears
His annual excuse for still
Remaining with that other bitch.
The rooms get painted, cats renewed,
And this month’s books are all begun.
A miracle is taking place.
So this is time, and time contains
Her history, and here she lives
Her history, from time to time.
Victorians
White heads, white hats, in garden chairs,
Enthusiasts of time,
Adulterous and hopeful men, who met
Their fallen girls at stations out of town:
This day of summer’s yours in perpetuity.
I cannot love your manners or your work,
But accidental bravery persists,
In homiletic lilac and your vanity in stone.
We were the epic exegetes
And called religiose.
We are what’s left when time retreats,
The syphilitic rose:
How honesty becomes opaque,
The reason drawing on:
We looked into the little lake
And wanted to be gone.
Let this be noon, before the letter comes,
The daughter coughs, the verses are exposed,
Before the century goes black,
And you go blind, and all the doors are closed.
The Disappointment
The sky becomes mother-of-pearl,
A lady’s box of trinketry.
The air inside it can remember
Lavender at two removes,
Like someone’s love once dreamed about
But not possessed, and longed for now.
In one of these burgherly houses,
Room on room on corridor,
It is someone’s finale, unpacking herself
From lint and pins and looking-glasses.
Bland with young ‘accomplishment’
Not even the letters are cryptic here,
Valuable only in histories of boredom:
Chat of some dud couple caught
In frames where time stands in for love,
With their backs to a sea to whose ironclad rightness,
Decked with pennants, fleet on fleet,
They bore unthinking witness. They were cold.
All afternoon I trudge around
Inventing tasks. I look and sniff
And find Victoria and Albert
Brilliant white and everpresent.
From windy plinths The Great outstare
The disappointment of their will
As dusk elaborates the park.
A duck-guffaw, a lacy hem of frost,
A salesman reading Penthouse in his car,
Pianoforte being taught and loathed –
Its sweet unwarranted effects,
Not brave enough for sorrow but still there.
The Police
No one believes them. Their windows get broken.
It rains in their yards and their kids
Dress in black and are sullen and pasty.
Their wives would like going to hangings:
They knit and they think about crime.
The police, they have allotments, too:
Like us they don’t get paid.
But their beans are like stone
And their lettuce like kelp
And black men come on moonless nights
To burn the greenhouse down,
And their windows are broken
So they don’t eat tomatoes.
The police, when they pot their begonias,
Press down with both thumbs, like that,
And a fly can be killed with one blow.
They are not jealous, the police.
When they stare at your allotment
They’re sure there’s a body below.
But if you say, ‘Yes, he’s a Roman,’
They ask you, ‘And how do you know?’
We are all called Sunshine,
Or else we are liars, or both.
We would be better off without ourselves,
Or cordoned off, at least.
The world is guilty of itself,
Except the police, that is.
The police are not immortal, though they try.
They are buried with honours and bicycle clips.
But black men come from the allotments
And chop their gravestones down.
Then lots of queers with foreign names
Dig them up and make films of their bones.
The Name
Vlad the Impaler, the torturer’s horse,
And the mercantile towers of Asia
Stacked with skulls like death’s exchequer.
Something must be done with Sunday:
Florid libraries deputize for God.
When the light has run back through the page
I can hear the wind gathering leaves,
But one name in the cursory millions
Has lodged like a seed in my throat.
Katya, whom Anonymous has praised
Forgettably for being young and his
In summer thirteen twenty-six.
This is only a way of repeating her name,
A charm, that can’t believe in time.
The wine my conscience drinks tonight
Can’t run as sweet and harsh as hers
Across my tongue. These apples cannot weigh
As firm and cool as hers upon my hands.
The Brochure
Built for bracing airs above the sea,
It shadows half the beach
And mines the sandstone cliff with larders.
Red brick, grey brick, yellow corners, square
And grosser than the national product.
Admire the glass-eyed Nemo-domes
And sawn-off fire-escapes
On the locked heights.
Behind the screams of hooded gulls
The screams of doomed remittance-men:
Behind them both, the rubber tread
Of floor-detectives, rigorously picked
From jails and noncommissioned ranks.
Their doctors’ bags are pursed
For pliers, greaseproof packets,
The complete range of fillings,
Toenails and St Christophers,
Postal orders, things in lockets,
Oaths extracted on notepaper
Headed The Grand, plus the various
Snifters of morphine, the various
Samples of semen and blood.
Minute attention is their mark,
While lower down in sweating kitchens
Waiters redirect the pipes
To the bottling plant. At the cocktail hour
Fine goblets of urine appear
On silver trays on tables at the doors
Of virgin brides: beneath each glass,
Lubricious propositions, costed.
Following dinner, the dancing with swords
And the drawing of lots for the novelty gangplank,
Pickled parts are raffled, old songs sung.
Be assured that none is excluded.
In case there is an enemy
The highly trained homunculi
Who staff our deep torpedo rooms
Will fire you from sewer-pipes
Across the moonlit bay.
Clio
(for Dave Lewis)
Arcane and absolutist aunt
Refusing access over tea,
You are my private hierophant
And you embroider me.
You say you know me inside out,
This man I haven’t met,
And you could tell me all about
What hasn’t happened yet.
But nothing happens here at all
As far as I can see.
The missing pictures on the wall
Are how it’s meant to be.
You have the leisure to be bored
And so you still trot out
The view that you must be adored,
Which I take leave to doubt:
Your ironies are second-rate,
Imagination nil –
So how do you concoct my fate,
And what about this will?
You smile that smile and preen yourself
And ply me with a bun:
You were the first one on the shelf
And all you’ve ever done
Is recognize my vanity,
And tease it till it screams,
Whilst feeling up my sanity,
The small coin of my dreams.
Gentility’s as impolite
And secretive as cancer –
Both kick several shades of shite
From any life-enhancer.
Then I hear, ‘Let’s try again
And then you can go home.
It takes a little English pain
To build a metronome.’
So I’m reciting day and night
The masters and their grief.
I’ll know when I have got it right
If boredom kills belief.
Remote and circular, your place
Evaluates my senses,
Palgrave’s Golden Interface,
Dismantler of tenses,
Scholar-Critic’s time machine,
Will Travel Anywhere,
Though somehow I have never been
Around when I was there.
So will you? Won’t you? Should I care?
Has it ended or begun?
I do not know if I can bear
Interminable fun.
But I don’t think I’ll ever die.
I don’t suppose you’ll let me.
Every time I say goodbye
You threaten to forget me.
William Ryan’s Song in July
Summer for me has always been August, no other.
I shall travel to no island
For Ryan is not to be fooled. Give me August
Or nothing. Can you understand?
Some fools that I have known have laughed
And cared to demonstrate
That August is the end and not the middle.
Yes, says I, for I chose in that knowledge.
The heat is blackened, full of dust then, Ryan
—I could have told you that.
The trees of an awful non-fighting weight
—Which is lost in a week. I had heard of all that.
August, let me say, is situate
Between July
And sonorous September. It’s a sort of middle
For the scary, no place to be in. Have you heard?
I shall give you July, for a gift.
In the Head
I watched her coming through the park
And wanted that black hair, that shape,
That curved voice calling me my name,
And as I wanted this I saw
Her life could not be touched by mine.
I know that she is real somewhere,
Her set of rooms and obligations
Owned impossibly without
Me coming up in dreams or talk,
Her earrings, postcards, clothes and love
Invisibly acquired and lost
With birth-certificates and keys:
A life imperial in scale
If I alone could enter it
To map its rich confusion and desire.
You could not count the theories
Aroused and then discredited
In this place in an afternoon,