A brilliant new collection from the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prize winning poet Showing O'Brien at the height of his powers, with his intellect and imagination as gratifyingly restless as ever, this collection is haunted by the missing, the missed, the vanished, the uncounted, and the uncountable lost--lost sleep, connections, muses, books, and the ghosts and gardens of childhood. Ultimately, the poet is led to contemplate the most troubling absences: O'Brien's elegies for his parents and friends form the heart of this book, and are the source of its pervasive note of...

Wordsworth was the first laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them, and against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes ('On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway'). His dismay was echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved English poems - Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', or Philip Larkin's 'Whitsun Weddings' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and waiting rooms, while locomotion has inspired some of the most characteristic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson,...

Each poem in Sean O'Brien's superb new collection opens on a wholly different room, vista, or landscape, each drawn with the poet's increasingly refined sense of tone, history, and rhetorical assurance. "The Beautiful Librarians" is a stock-taking of sorts, and a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our culture, often overlooked by both capital and official account. Here we find infantrymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar but none more heroic than the librarians of the title, those silent and silencing guardians of literature and knowledge who, the poet reminds us, also...

Many of the poems in Sean O Brien s new collection take their emotional tenor and imaginative cue from his acclaimed translation of "Dante s Inferno," and occupy a dark, flooded, subterranean world, as dramatically compelling as it is disquieting. Circumstances have compelled O Brien to return repeatedly to the elegiac form, and "The Drowned Book" contains a number of powerfully moving poems written in memory of fellow poets and artists. "The Drowned Book" again shows O Brien as master of the authoritative line, and underscores his pre-eminence among contemporary English poets."