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    Downriver
    Downriver
    Downriver
    Ebook108 pages54 minutes

    Downriver

    By Sean O'Brien

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    About this ebook

    While Downriver contains the English urban pastoral and hymns to the Northern deities for which Sean O’Brien is justly celebrated, the poet has always been more a singer than even his many admirers have sometimes conceded: here, that lyric note is sounded more openly than ever before.

    With Downriver, his fifth collection, O’Brien has produced his most various and mature work yet. This is a poetry of both delicacy and gravity, assuagement as well as agitation, rivers that start in hell but later fall as rain – and will only strengthen his reputation as one of the most gifted English poets at work today.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPan Macmillan
    Release dateJun 28, 2012
    ISBN9781447215110
    Downriver
    Author

    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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      Book preview

      Downriver - Sean O'Brien

      For Douglas and Peter, Peter and Douglas

      Contents

      Acknowledgements

      Welcome, Major Poet!

      Acheron, Phlegethon, Styx

      Nineties

      The Ideology

      At the Gate

      The Eavesdroppers

      Last Orders at the Fusilier, Forest Hall

      Ravilious

      Piers Powerbook’s Prologue

      A Northern Assembly

      Baltica

      Riding on the City of New Orleans

      Indian Summer

      Kanji

      The Grammar School Ghost

      Cities

      The Underwater Songbook

      Songs from the Drowned Book

      Songs from the Black Path

      Songs from Downriver

      Sports Pages

      1 Proem

      2 The Origins of Sport from Remote Times

      3 The Olympics

      4 Football! Football! Football!

      5 Amerika

      Noonday

      Lines on Mr Porter’s Birthday

      Postcards to the Rain God

      Synopsis

      Ex Historia Geordisma

      Poem for a Psychiatric Conference

      The Railway Sleeper

      The Genre: A Travesty of Justice

      Notes on ‘The Underwater Songbook’

      Acknowledgements

      The Guardian, The Independent, Interchange, Kunapipi, London Magazine, London Review of Books, British Council New Writing, A Paean for Peter Porter, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Red Herring, Recreation, Stand, Subtext, The Sunday Times and the Times Literary Supplement.

      A number of these poems appeared in a pamphlet, The Ideology (Smith Doorstop, 1997).

      ‘The Genre’ was commissioned for the Poetry Society’s website under the Poetry Places scheme. ‘Last Orders at the Fusilier,Forest Hall’ was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 for A Book of Hours, broadcast on National Poetry Day, 1999. ‘A Northern Assembly’ was commissioned by New Writing North for the Northern Cultural Debate at the 1999 Durham Literature Festival. ‘Poem for a Psychiatric Conference’ was commissioned by the Neuropsychiatric Department of Newcastle Royal Victoria Hospital, and was published in The Construction of Power and Authority in Psychiatry, edited by Phil Barker and Chris Stevenson (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2000) and Beyond Bedlam,edited by Matthew Sweeney and Ken Smith (Anvil).

      The author is grateful to the British Council and the Society of Authors for support in completing this book.

      Welcome, Major Poet!

      We have sat here in too many poetry readings

      Wearing the liberal rictus and cursing our folly,

      Watching the lightbulbs die and the curtains rot

      And the last flies departing for Scunthorpe.

      Forgive us. We know all about you.

      Autumn gives way to midwinter once more,

      As states collapse, as hemlines rise, as we miss both,

      And just as our teeth fall discreetly into our handkerchiefs,

      Slowly the bones of our co-tormentees will emerge

      Through their skins. QED and hic jacent.

      Except we are seated bolt upright on customized

      ‘Chairs’ of the torturers’ school. Here it comes,

      Any century now, the dread declaration:

      And next I shall read something longer. Please

      Rip out our nails and accept your applause!

      Stretch-limo back to the Ritz and ring home:

      Bore the arse off your nearest and dearest instead,

      Supposing they haven’t divorced you already

      Or selfishly put themselves under a train.

      Please call them, at length and at public expense.

      Send flunkies for cold Stolichnaya, an ox

      Or an acre of coke and a thousand-quid hooker.

      Why not make it three, in a chariot

      Flown to your penthouse by eunuchs on leopards?

      Whatever you like, only spare us the details of when

      You were struck by your kinship with Dante and Vergil.

      And don’t feel obliged to remind us just now

      What it was Robert Lowell appeared to be saying –

      You’d read him the poem you mean to read us –

      When the doors of the lift he was in and you weren’t Began closing. Just leave us the screams

      You could hear as the vehicle descended: Poor Cal.

      Up to then he’d been perfectly normal. Ah, well.

      Acheron, Phlegethon, Styx

      for Peter Reading

      Now they’re bricked over and leaking

      Victorian adipose into the friable earth

      In the heat of a seven-year drought,

      They deliver that steady industrial suck-fart

      (Like a Scots Pie machine making

      Full use of the eyelids and sphincters of pigs)

      At the foot of the drainshaft, down in the cack

      With rubbers, rags and jaundiced Telegraphs

      Rolled up in twos, sworn on by plumbers –

      Themselves long pulled under –

      For checking the flush. Furthermore

      The crimson hiss of the exhausted brain,

      Its library all clarted pages, corridors

      Knee-deep in grease, the gridlocked blood

      Attempting pinhole exits at the eyeballs.

      Gore and shite, crap-nebulae

      And greasy bubbles, steadily hurled

      Downstream in a stench of finality. Cheers!

      Nineties

      I

      Let’s drift again in these vast solitudes,

      The beer-and-tabs Sargasso of the shore,

      Anachronistic legal waterholes

      Down foggy chares

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