Towards the end of his last collection, Ghost Train, Sean O'Brien attacks those amateur writers in the North East who are not fortunate enough to be able to write as well as him, and the first poem in this new collection, 'Welcome, Major Poet', picks up that sledgehammer again. Yes, this writer seems particularly fond of telling us that, truly, many people write badly, unlike Mr. O'Brien, who has won awards, and indeed, whose blurb announces as 'one of the most gifted English poets writing today...' Well, many of us aren't David Beckham, but we still turn up for the odd footy-match; some of us aren't Stephen Kovacevich, but we still tinkle the odd tune on the piano. So what's the point?
I suppose, O'Brien has made his reputation as a hard-hitting, politically edged poet - a breath of fresh air in a contemporary scene starting to seem as blandly depoliticised as a small town American shopping mall. In powerful books like H.M.S Glasshouse O'Brien eked out the politics and history from elegy and urban pastoral, unafraid of leaving his anger or outrage undiluted, whilst still holding onto to very high levels of control and craftsmanship, often sustained over long and complex utterances. Indeed, Downriver has some powerful, satirically edged pieces. 'Piers Powerbook's Prologue' is a particularly sharp piece of writing, cutting to the quick of Blairite complacencies, wonderfully capturing the spirit of William Langland's visionary allegory, Piers Ploughman.
Often, however, O'Brien's satire comes on like a relentless, trochee driven freight train, its hard steel wheels rolling gratuitously over the prone necks of countless victims. O'Brien is no Alexander Pope. His work often thumps, sneers, blows raspberries like a sullen grammar school prefect - obsessed by excreta, sphincters, willies - quick to adopt a world-weary, histrionic pose, happier on the offensive, laying into someone else from a position of strength; a literary manifestation of our good old bully culture, where 'big boys' stick the boot into the vulnerable as well as the deserving. The blurb of this book tells us that the book sounds a more lyrical note more openly than before, but, for this reader, it is not sounded openly enough, which is a shame, because when O'Brien sounds it, he sounds it well...
One of the most successful poems of the volume is 'The Ideology'...it sustains its questioning, slightly disaffected note just about long enough to achieve some real take off into the kind of almost compassionate lyricism that O'Brien excels in - the brand that has always enabled him to bypass sentiment or cliché in the best of his work. Here his involvement with his subject really lifts his work into the higher altitude of conscience...Overall, though, the note is more curmudgeonly. If technique, style, irony and control were everything, I would give this volume 4 stars. As it is, generosity, I think, should be considered a major loss to any poet's repertoire.
