C.E.J. Simons reviews The Drowned Book by Sean O’Brien

Poverty aside, there is nothing worse for a poet than being told they are at ‘the height of their powers’.  Sean O’Brien is the only poet to have twice won the Forward Prize, a fact which makes this book’s problems difficult to understand.  There are fine poems scattered throughout The Drowned Book.  Those familiar with O’Brien’s previous work will find the same subjects here: the North of England, railways, the World Wars.  But the central problem in The Drowned Book lies in its abundance of poems on the subject of water.  Water is a tricky image.  Used carefully, its can hold almost any symbolic meaning—from the immensity of Wordsworth’s ‘boy of Winander’ lines or Arnold’s ‘Dover Beach’, to the minutiae of MacNeice’s ‘The Lake in the Park’.  Used excessively and without development, however, it can turn a poem soggy with sameness.

This is unfortunately the case for The Drowned Book.    The volume’s water poems appear to have grown out of a joint project titled ‘Songs from the Drowned Book’, in which, as O’Brien recounts,

a group of writers and visual artists imagined a creation myth for the North of England, the basic premise being, in the beginning, everything was under water.

This is not a striking premise, and would require ingenuity and discipline to sustain twenty pages of poetry.  Yet in The Drowned Book’s opening sequence, no great range in perspective ensues, and so the effect remains one of uniformity rather than unity.  Throughout these poems, O’Brien employs repeated water imagery including rain, rivers, barges, locks, estuaries, seas, tides, drains, damp, cellars, floods, fishing and drowning.  However, this texture of imagery, both within and between the poems, does not propel any substantial development in idea or argument.

For example, ‘River-doors’ begins with the opening of the title’s eponymous doors.  But in the poem’s final two lines, the doors are still opening:

And as the product of refreshment hear
The river-door quietly open downstairs
Under the weight of the waters.

Even in poems that seek to evoke stagnation, thought must progress.  Here it does not.  All the water in these poems leads only to more water—or at most, to the idea that human life and human industry frequently end in water, or can be symbolized by water.  For such a long sequence, this meagre tautology is not enough.  Few of O’Brien’s water images linger in the mind past a first reading.  Compare these poems, if not to the heights of Yeats’ ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, then to contemporary water poems by other northern poets: Jacob Polley’s ‘Fish’ and ‘The Kingdom of Sediment’ and ‘Black Water’; Paul Farley’s ‘Peter and the Dyke’ and ‘Monkfish’ and ‘Civic’.

Perhaps due to this lack of progression, many of the water poems in The Drowned Book have problematic endings.  Stagnation as subject leads to stagnation in style.  A majority of the poems end with a literal descent into water, darkness, or both (‘Water-Gardens’, ‘River-doors’, ‘Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins’, ‘Drains’, ‘A Coffin-Boat’, ‘The River in Prose’, ‘The River Road’, ‘Grey Bayou’).  This technique becomes a wearying escape clause.  The last lines of ‘The Mere’ descend not into literal water, but worse: a definition of the poem’s title word.  Finally, ‘Drains’ ends in doggerel:

Some say the drains are heaven’s guts,
Out [sic.] progress intestinal.
Wherever peristalsis leads
The outcome will be final.

This grating humour is not an isolated incident.  The Drowned Book shows a predilection for weak puns, with O’Brien’s over-indulgences often inviting the reader to take serious poems lightly.  ‘Eating the Salmon of Knowledge from Tins’—which attempts more seriousness than its Billy-Collins-esque title suggests—contains the crashing phrase ‘Bradys-in-waiting’.  In ‘Symposium at Port Louis’, O’Brien derails a serious poem on Mauritius (a former centre of the slave trade) with the awful, ‘Once again we ship Coles’ Notes/ To Newcastle.’  The title ‘Three Facetious Poems’ prepares the reader for humour, but the second poem ends with the unredeemable line, ‘That’s why the lady is a trope.’  Some of Sinatra’s original fans are still alive, and carry guns.

Along with these moments of self-indulgence, mishaps of sound and sense create a strong impression that the book was hastily assembled and edited.  Typographical errors in ‘Drains’ and ‘A Coffin-Boat’ can be corrected in a second edition.  The same goes for errors in scientific vocabulary.  ‘Cut deep into the cortex’ in ‘Song: Habeas Corpus’ is inaccurate; the cerebral cortex is less than five millimetres thick.  And ‘geostationary satellite’ in ‘Blue Night’ should read ‘geosynchronous satellite’; geostationary satellites are impossible to see from the poem’s Arctic latitudes.

Other problems in meter, rhyme, and phrasing are not so easy to remedy.  Throughout the book, they intrude to break the flow of close reading.  In ‘Three Lighthouses’, O’Brien writes:

This evening the ferry will carry us
Home with the workers off shift,
An old couple, a mother and child,
 
And whatever our dead friends
Would say if they stood
In the bow alongside us, remember,
 
To take in the sight…

The verb active in the first two stanzas is ‘carry’; i.e. the ferry carries us home (in unfortunate sing-song) with off-shift workers, an old couple, a mother and child, and ‘whatever our dead friends/ Would say’ to us.  Only when we reach ‘remember’ does it become clear that the first and second stanzas are separate clauses.  This is unintentional fused syntax.  Similarly, ‘The Mere’ opens with the lines:

Its poplars and willows and sludge.  Its gnat-clouds.
Smell of cooling animal at dusk.
 
No matter how forcefully these lines are read aloud, they struggle to convey the full stop at the end of the first line.  This muddiness turns ‘Smell’ from noun to intransitive verb.

Problems of sound aside, The Drowned Book exhibits a knack for phrases that clash with common sense.  Good poetry breaks down cliché by focusing hard light on language, forcing the reader to make conceptual leaps.  O’Brien’s assertions, on the other hand, often sound absurd.  ‘The Mere’ asserts that ‘Life is a word you can sometimes remember’—most people have no trouble.  ‘Three Lighthouses’ states that ‘the world we have lived in/ Is real’—Locke and Hume would be relieved.  And ‘After Rilke: To Holderlin’ attempts a sort of Platonic conclusion that ‘Only in eternity shall we encounter lakes.’  Not so.

Though perhaps the drowned poems cannot be saved, getting past them proves occasionally worthwhile.  The rest of the book could have benefited from judicious editing, but it offers some fine material.  ‘Thom Gunn’, a sonnet in measured tones, is the best of the book’s many elegies—although Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’ now sours any poem in which it appears.  Other poems that come as a relief after the stagnant water include ‘The Thing’, ‘Cherchez la Femme’, and ‘Sung Dynasty’, all of which exhibit a more refined humour.  ‘Railway Hotel’, ‘Grimshaw’ and ‘Blizzard’ complete the volume’s best.  ‘Lost Song of the Apparatus’ has a good, if slightly tenuous, idea at its heart: a progression through a list of defunct northern train stations, interspersed with sequential excerpts from notes to the fourth book of Virgil’s Georgics.  Ultimately, however, the poem’s syntax proves too awkward to sustain its idea; it reads more like notes for a poem than a poem itself.

The volume’s political poems also bear mention—again, as poems which should have been revised or cut outright.  In brief, they lack nuance.  Reading them inspires what O’Brien elsewhere terms the ‘liberal rictus’.  Last year Simon Armitage front-loaded Tyrannosaurus Rex vs. the Corduroy Kid with his anti-war poems; in contrast, the political rhetoric of The Drowned Book lurks in its middle depths.  ‘Song: Habeas Corpus’ sets itself up as a pub chant, but this premise cannot excuse its limping rhythms and weak rhymes.  Nothing distinguishes it from thousands of angry performances currently heard at slams across the U.K.

‘Valedictory’, O’Brien’s caustic diatribe against Thatcherism, employs more original rhymes than ‘Habeas Corpus’, and ends on an expansive note.  Nevertheless, its fifth stanza concludes by rhyming ‘we’ve learned/ Her lesson’ with ‘where are you, Smith/ And Wesson?’  This kind of lynch-mob rhetoric only scores political own goals.  Finally, although ‘Proposal for a Monument to the Third International’ contains memorable lines, it slips into a weary strain when the Chorus declares:

Putin in his sheet-steel chariot
Is brandishing a grail of blood and vlaast…

This is tourist-level politicizing.  If a poet chooses to write political rhetoric, they must aspire to a depth of political enquiry worthy of their poetic depth.  As David Holdeman writes on Yeats’ response to the Easter Rising, the best political poetry satisfies

anyone who believes that artists have an obligation to model complex responses to complex events even when audiences clamour for simple reassurance.

For better or worse, the time of Shelley and Peterloo is long gone.

If the above criticisms seem pointed, fine lines in O’Brien’s own ‘Blue Night’ ably remind us of the stakes for which serious poetry plays:

Therefore.  Therefore.  Do not be weak.
They have no time for pity or belief,
The heavens, in their triumph of technique.

Few contemporary poets have earned such a triumph.  Professor O’Brien is an experienced poet and teacher of poetry, and the best moments in the volume demonstrate his mature capabilities.  But perhaps the only thing worse for a poet than being told that he has reached ‘the height of his powers’ is believing it.  Inexperienced poets flourish under the watchfulness of uncompromising editors.  Eventually, established poets earn the right to defy this scrutiny.  They do so at their peril.

Sean O’Brien, The Drowned Book.  Picador, £8.99

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.