Aggressive, witty and dramatic, Sean O'Brien's poems convey the texture of imaginative life, not just its recorded highlights. Sean O'Brien's territory is urban pastoral. Its focus in The Indoor Park is Pearson Park in Hull, a paradigm of Victorian leisure and ambition. As his imagination explores its historical melancholy, Sean O'Brien discovers the strangeness of a familiar place. There are also poems in The Indoor Park which evoke the feeling of a maritime city, with its real and imagined departures. The Indoor Park was Sean O'Brien's first collection of poems, and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. It won him a Somerset Maugham Award. A selection of his work was included in Douglas Dunn's anthology A Rumoured City: new poets from Hull (1982).