The Drowned Book
by Sean O'Brien
Summary
The Drowned Book is soaked through: its poems move among rivers, rain, canals, culverts, flooded cellars, and the underworld those waters have always opened into, and out of that one element Sean O'Brien builds an elegiac history of the English North. O'Brien grew up in Hull, a port city living under sea level and under economic sentence, and the drowned landscapes here are personal and political at once, the submerged industrial world of docks, railways, and public libraries, the postwar social democratic England he has spent a career mourning and defending, sunk but still visible from the surface, like a town under a reservoir. The collection's dead are individual too; its elegies include poems for fellow poets, and the water keeps turning Stygian, the river as the crossing everyone makes. O'Brien had just finished a verse translation of Dante's Inferno, and it shows, the couplets and processionals of this book carrying an infernal authority, a guide's voice, sardonic and grand, conducting the reader downward through England's basements. He is also the wittiest angry poet of his generation, and the gloom keeps breaking into savage comedy, which is the Northern manner exactly. The Drowned Book made history of the administrative kind as well: it won both the Forward Prize and the 2007 T.S. Eliot Prize, a same year double Ted Hughes had managed before him with Birthday Letters, and it carried O'Brien to his record third Forward Prize for Best Collection. It remains his central book, the place where the water table and the body of work meet.
Historical Context & Significance
O'Brien belongs to the Hull line that runs from Larkin through Douglas Dunn, poets of provincial England observed without illusion, and he doubled for decades as one of the most feared critic reviewers in British poetry, which made the 2007 sweep of Forward and Eliot prizes for The Drowned Book a settling of accounts in both directions. The book appeared in the year of widespread English floods, an accident of timing its readers noticed. O'Brien's later work, including his professorship at Newcastle and further collections, extended the project, but the double crowned book remains the one by which the career is cited, the high water mark in the exact sense, and the elegist of the drowned North has kept his subject as the waters keep rising.