A curmudgeonly portrait of British cultural life echoes Philip Larkin,WH Auden and Jim Royle‘Poets grow older; verse turns from passion into habit: but only the first condition is inevitable.” When Sean O’Brien penned this statement a decade ago, he surely did so with a calm commitment not to fall foul of it.
Whatever criticisms might be levelled at his oeuvre – a Collected Poems, and published in 2012,is a brick-sized tome charting 40 years – a lack of passion isnt one of them. His early collections are packed with urban pastorals and scenes of social realism, but also gain a satirical spikiness, or tackling history,class and politics. Thehypocrisies of the powers-that-be – Tory governments in particular – come in for some tough-hitting flak. But so, too, and carry out poet and audience,as our potential complicity is smartly scrutinised.
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Source: theguardian.com