‘What makes a person a bore in conversation?’ asks Michael Donaghy in the course of propounding his five rules for the newly enrolled poet: ‘Droning on about himself? Preaching? Telling you what to think? All these things make for boring poetry too’. Moreover, as Donaghy judiciously imparts, ‘The sad fact is that nobody wants to know what you think. They want to discover what they think.’ Starting out as a poet himself it was in Derek Mahon’s poetry of ‘the singing line’ as well as in that of Mahon’s forebear Louis MacNeice that Donaghy found ‘a voice that engaged the whole of one’s consciousness without resorting to any theories or manifestos. It used a richly varied diction and syntax. It could be witty and ride a razor edge of irony, and in the next line break your heart or fill you with wonder.’ Apart from being one of the most exact descriptions of the work of Mahon and MacNeice that one might encounter, Donaghy’s evaluation reminds us of just what is lacking in the recent poetry of one of Mahon’s most ardent devotees. Regularly touted as ‘the most prize-winning poet of his generation’, firmly established as a prominent critic, editor, and currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, it has doubtless been some time since Sean O’Brien considered enrolling in a  workshop. Yet as his latest collection November makes apparent, it is not only the trainee-poet who would do well to consult the finer points of Donaghy’s no-nonsense starter manual.

Throughout the interminable November, O’Brien can be seen exhibiting the most fatal symptoms of what Donald Hall – in a winningly self-deprecating moment of self-diagnosis – once identified as the ‘elegiac syndrome’. In O’Brien’s full-blown case, the disorder is brought on by a deleterious predilection for death, decay and dereliction, which culminates finally, after a prolonged period of formal debilitation and acute artistic failure, in a pallid, lifeless poetic by-product. Although the disorder is not usually contagious the exposed reader can expect to experience a range of adverse reactions, including depression, dismay, varying degrees of disgust, and even, in the more extreme and distressing cases, death by boredom. Not for O’Brien is death the mother of beauty. Rather, it emanates a stale, oppressive gloom that becomes increasingly deadly as the collection progresses and as the memories of far greater elegists – Mahon, MacNeice, Muldoon, O’Hara, Larkin, Plath, Eliot, Auden and Yeats – are stoked. An indefatigable elegist of the working-class North of England and of all that is necessarily grim up there and elsewhere O’Brien is always dutifully mindful of tradition but is less attentive, it would seem, to matters of individual talent. Moreover, instead of the poetry of ‘the singing line’ throughout November it is the choking sound of the death-rattle that we hear.

But we do at least start off on the right note, or at least close to it. One of the few snatches of the ‘singing line’ that the reader must otherwise strain to hear throughout is the opening poem ‘Fireweed’ which voices the collection’s persistent motifs and is sensitively composed with an ear to rhythm and articulation and – suitably for a collection that is so dominated by trains, by lines of travel and retrospective journeying – with an eye to the possibilities of movement across the musical silences and spaces of the line- and the stanza-breaks:

     Look away for a moment.
     Then look back and see

     How the fireweed’s taking the strain.
     This song’s in praise of strong neglect

     In the railway towns, in the silence
     After the age of the train.

Rosebay willowherb – or ‘fireweed’ as it is more commonly known due to its ability to flourish in bombsites and scorched ground – is a hardy perennial plant adorned with an eye-catching magenta flower. Just as this ubiquitous plant, spread by the expansion of rail networks across Britain, continues to grow in barren, disturbed soil, thereby colonising otherwise desolate landscapes with its lustrous blossoms, so here, in this dynamic opening song, echoic sonic chains and networks of assonantal linkages generate a kinetic energy across the otherwise empty spaces of the page. The verb ‘strain’ soars mimetically across the swinging lines to harmonise in the final ‘train’,  its vowel-music reverberating with a propulsive effect through ‘taking’, ‘praise’, ‘railway’ and ‘age’. Poetic form here sings of the same resilient vitality that the fireweed itself embodies. And the effects themselves are sonorous, moving, and proof of what O’Brien can do when he leaves the poem to suggest its own mysteries to the reader. Because of this it remains one of the most memorable pieces in the entire collection.

Elsewhere, however, O’Brien follows Donaghy’s blueprint for ‘boring poetry’ – the ‘preaching’, ‘droning on’ and tendency to tell the reader what to think are all there – as the ‘singing line’ is abandoned and he assumes the podium to vent his own long-held concerns (or grievances) with class, politics and history. Dogmatic to the end even the ‘Elegy’ addressed to his dead mother cannot avoid grandiloquent politicising: ‘The state that failed to keep the faith / Pursues you for its money back’. ‘Tell that to the clerks who’d rob your grave’ he angrily denounces. O’Brien persists in telling the reader how to read, how to think, and this despite the fact that one poem, ‘Aspects of the Novel’, smugly looks down on the ‘Uninvited Reader’ – the ‘seeker after knowledge, / Truth and Beauty, equipped / With disposable income’ – as a customer who expects a service. Every occasion is an occasion for political comment as O’Brien casts himself in that favoured role of the working-class hero and a paid-up subscriber to Larkinesque deprivation. Indeed, O’Brien outdoes Larkin in the field of ‘Welfare State sub-poetry’ with his brand of monotone, hackneyed, loud-speaker verse. ‘You sleepless masses, whither politics?’ he harangues the reader in the poem titled ‘Sleep’.

Drawing obsessively on a predictably working-class childhood, the pretentiously-titled ‘Cahiers du Cinema’, a claustrophobia-inducing sonnet sequence, has O’Brien as auteur directing his life-long love-affair with the cinema as escapist retreat. With numerous swashbuckling heroes of the silver screen making cameo appearances throughout, the poem is clearly derivative of Muldoon’s strategies in ‘Yarrow’ yet the comparison serves only to illuminate O’Brien’s misadventures in this mode. ‘But this was Hull: no 3D specs for us’ our down-at-heel hero gripes, as this generational tendency, knowingly disparaged by the Bronx-born Donaghy as the ‘cliché sob-story of the working-class writer’, is laid on thick with an honest tradesman’s trowel. How the reader longs for some escape from all of this browbeating. ‘Mothers of America / Let your kids go to the movies!’ Frank O’Hara comically enjoins in his exuberant cinema-poem ‘Ave Maria’. In O’Brien’s ‘Verité: Great Junction Street’ we are treated instead to the utterly humourless cinema bore:

     Bite down, once more, my fellow citizens, into
     The silver foil in which your choc-ice comes,
     For when it meets your fillings that is all
     The ecstasy eternity will grant –
     No tongues, no hands up skirts, no chance.

Reading the poetry being tossed off in Britain today by established poets in middle-age one is forced to wonder just how many pontificating, wistful old farts one Cinema Paradiso can hold. Down with this sort of thing, one ventures to protest.

How different from the collection’s delicate opening prelude is its prolix, puffed-up finale, ‘On the Toon’ wherein O’Brien gives himself epic licence to truly indulge his appetite for lofty social and moral judgement. Following the surely by-now exhausted route of the Dantean poet through the seedy underworld of the contemporary city – Newcastle by night becomes the ‘Hell of Tyne’ with its ‘locked-in boozers’ full of ‘fat slags’ and ‘slabs of lard / in dandruffed suits’ – our clearly past-it poet-hero flashes his artistic currency to choose for himself a scantily-clad, alcopop-swigging floozy as Virgilian ‘guide’; one of many kindred spirits, all essentially voices of the poet, who are encountered along the dark way. ‘We speak the truth /And for our knowledge we are flayed alive / Like Marsyas’, the poet disguised as an obligatory chorus of down-and-outs laments his poetic lot in Canto II. What is clearly just a typical night out in any city is nightmarish to O’Brien’s sensibilities – a veritable ‘proletarian bacchanal’  – as, putting the cant in canto over ten pages of long-winded, very loose iambics, he sets out to lift the ubiquitous veil of ignorance from over Tyneside and bring the common reader out of the dark. ‘Massage my feet’, the poet’s nubile guide orders him at a spectacularly cringe-worthy moment in what is little more than a sustained delusion at the levels of both art and life. This muddled middle-of-the-road, mid-life fantasy of the poetic ego expires finally with an (unintentionally) hilarious, overblown finale in which a long-benighted, sordid Newcastle is momentarily transformed by the ceremonious arrival of the river-borne sun-poet and his  crew as all are greeted to a hero’s welcome by the ‘ordinary citizens’ of Tyneside at tear-jerking end.

Because of the uniformity of so much contemporary British poetry it can perhaps be difficult at first to pinpoint exactly how O’Brien’s poetry fails as art, that is, until we arrive at ‘The Landing Stage’ and the answer begins to reveal itself. Derek Mahon’s influence on contemporary British poetry has of course been profound – O’Brien himself is a ‘great fan’ – and Mahon as the intrepid pioneer into a territory marked out by disused sheds and garages must surely act as an important role-model for O’Brien and his exploratory ambitions; indeed Mahon’s prized variety of Wexford mushrooms are cultivated in ‘Europeans’. Dedicated to Mahon, ‘The Landing-Stage’ comes after O’Brien’s elegy for ‘Michael’ (Donaghy) in the collection’s closing pages. Here the poet Mahon, one of the few of November’s undead, takes to the stage at a poetry reading. ‘Like one surprised yet tolerant, / You walk out of the darkness now’, the poem opens, with Coleridge’s ‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ audible here. As this suggests, the language is a little too cloyingly decorous and overwrought, with lines such as ‘Who even as you speak to us / Take care to keep your counsel still’ intensifying the stultifying archaic air. As O’Brien apes Mahon’s stylistic moves in this over-eager fan-letter what is missing throughout the rest of November becomes apparent. Here are the concluding stanzas:

     In our unheroic age
     You have sustained a northern clarity
     Enriched with the harmonics of the south,
     And learned to voice whatever is the case
     For wisdom’s and its own sweet sake
     As music, intimate and vast.
     You let the grave itself unstop its mouth.

     You tell the language that your love
     Endures, whatever you have undergone
     Of shipwreck or dry-docked disorder:
     Wave-wanderer, beach-comber, far-flung
     Singer with a shell for Nausicaa, at home
     Nowhere and everywhere, but here and now,
     And straddling the border once again.

As O’Brien tries to out-Mahon Mahon here the poem almost lifts off. Mahon’s entrance in the book functions as a salutary reminder of what is wrong with O’Brien’s poetry, and, by extension, with the type of written-to-formula poetry that is being peddled in Britain today. Far from ‘straddling the border’ or being ‘at home / nowhere and everywhere’, O’Brien’s is rigorously one-sided, one-dimensional, unable to live in doubt or uncertainty as it stubbornly rehearses its fixed views within closed boundaries. ‘It was so liberating to discover that you could do this, write beautiful, memorable language and yet still be funny and ironic’, Donaghy rapturously remembers his discovery of Mahon’s work. Ultimately, O’Brien’s verse lacks these qualities but most of all it lacks Mahon’s formal necessity. Mahon himself has stated that form must be ‘organic’: the ‘chemicals hissing inside the well-wrought urn’. There is no space within November’s stiff, lifeless structures for the vivifying forces of ambiguity, multiplicity, the dynamics of tensions and lively oppositions; words must serve the cause of straightforward political and social opinion. Music, imagination, wisdom and humility are in short supply. Discussing Mahon’s landmark ‘A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford’ as ‘a poem where Mahon’s poetic gifts come together in a great elegy for the lost ones of the world’, O’Brien observes how it ‘takes weary facts – death, decay, fear solitude – and reanimates them for the reader’s contemplation’. No such transformative process occurs in November. O’Brien has also noted how ‘Mahon's fascination with stanzaic form serves him well [...] It has brought him many imitators, but few so far have managed to create [his] kind of richly furnished echo chambers’. This is true of so many of Mahon’s spacious, resonant poems but the same cannot be said for those of his imitator in this impoverished collection where poetry fails to live.

‘I had a bucket of excrement dumped on my head for daring to criticise the North-East’, O’Brien once reported and his suitably feculent punishment points up the serious lack of willingness on the part of contemporary poetry critics to read beyond prizes and packaging. Naked emperors abide and ‘all because’, in the words of Donaghy, ‘no one stood up and said it was piss’. In his introduction to Donaghy’s Collected Poems O’Brien criticises the ‘ultimate sterility of the poem-as-anecdote which is so heavily represented on the contemporary scene’. There is much sterility on the contemporary scene contributing to which is the type of cadaverous specimen that O’Brien offers up here: the poem as aggressively instructive autobiographical anecdote, as blatant social manifesto, as soapbox oration stridently telling the reader how to think but failing to help us to live our lives, break our hearts or fill us with wonder. Donald Hall has described the impulse towards elegy as ‘to try to make it endure in language as it could not endure in the flesh’ and this seems truer to the poetic enterprise. Too few of the poems here ‘endure’ beyond a first or second reading, even fewer make language live as the flesh cannot. Ultimately, this bleak, inhospitable November presents the reader with few places where a thought might grow.

Sean O’Brien, November, Picador, 2011. £8.99. 978-0-33053-500-7

© Maria Johnston, 2011
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.