The Indoor Park by Sean O'brien
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).
Sean O'Brien entertains the possibility of an updated traditional elegance.. in O'Brien's work, the educated idioms of contemporary verse are sieved through a nervy, critical experience of contemporary life. -- Douglas Dunn
Sean O'Brien is perhaps the greatest stylist in the anthology [A Rumoured City: new poets from Hull, ed. Douglas Dunn, 1982]. He looks at the swarming detritus which is England, people living like cheese mites in all that history, and finds reassuring pictures of rejuvenation and ordinariness. -- Peter Porter * Observer *
Sean O'Brien is perhaps the greatest stylist in the anthology [A Rumoured City: new poets from Hull, ed. Douglas Dunn, 1982]. He looks at the swarming detritus which is England, people living like cheese mites in all that history, and finds reassuring pictures of rejuvenation and ordinariness. -- Peter Porter * Observer *
Sean O'Brien has published nine books of poetry, including November (Picador 2011, PBS Choice) and The Drowned Book (Picador, 2007), winner of the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, followed by Collected Poems (Picador, 2012), The Beautiful Librarians (PBS Choice, Picador, 2015), joint winner of the inaugural Roehampton Poetry Prize, and the T.S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Europa (Picador, 2018). Bloodaxe published his first two collections, The Indoor Park (1983) and The Frighteners (1987), as well as his essays, The Deregulated Muse (1998), and later, his Newcastle-Bloodaxe Poetry Lectures, Journeys to the Interior: Ideas of England in contemporary poetry (2012). His anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 was published by Picador in 1998. His translation of the Inferno appeared in 2006, his short story collection The Silence Room in 2008, and his novel Afterlife in 2009. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he lives in Newcastle upon Tyne and is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780906427491 |
| ISBN 10 | 0906427495 |
| Title | The Indoor Park |
| Author | Sean O'brien |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Bloodaxe Books Ltd |
| Year published | 1983-03-24 |
| Number of pages | 64 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |