It Says Here

Sean OBriens follow-up to his celebrated collection Europahas a vision as rich and wide-ranging as its predecessor. Set against shorter ruthlessly focused piecesvicious and scabrous political sketches and satires charting the growth of extremism and the disintegration of democracyare meditations on the imaginative life dream and remembrance time and recurrence. There are elegies for friends and fellow poets; paranoiac brooding pastorals; other poems lay bare the maddening trials of a historically literate mind as it attempts to navigate a world gone post-content post-intellectual and at times post-memory. At the center of the book is the long poem Hammersmith a shadowy cinematic dream-vision of England during and since World War II. Here OBrien charts a psychogeographic journey through the English countryside and the haunted precincts of London mapping a labyrinth of love madness and lost history. The result is a stirring illuminating document of a time of immense societal flux and upheaval by one of our finest poets and most insightful cultural commentators.