Europa

Description

Europa, Sean O'Brien's ninth collection of poems, is a timely and necessary book. Europe is not a place we can choose to leave: it is also a shared heritage and an age-old state of being, a place where our common dreams, visions and nightmares recur and mutate. In placing our present crises in the context of an imaginative past, O'Brien show how our futures will be determined by what we choose to understand of our own European identity - as well as what we remember and forget of our shared history. Europa is a magisterial, grave and lyric work of from one of the finest poets of the age: it shows not just a Europe haunted by disaster and the threat of apocalypse, but an England where the shadows lengthen and multiply even in its most familiar and domestic corners. Europa, the poet reminds us, shapes the fate of everyone in these islands - even those of us who insist that they live elsewhere.

Sean O'Brien's poetry has received numerous awards, including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize (three times), the E.M. Forster Award and the Roehampton Poetry Prize. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. Europa is his ninth collection. His work has been published in several languages. His novel Once Again Assembled Here was published in 2016. He is also a critic, editor, translator, playwright and broadcaster. Born in London, he grew up in Hull. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

The collection's title places its concerns within the political climate of our time . . . Among his exploration of European identity are reflections on a shared history, but also on his own ambiguous sense of place as a vagrant writer . . . O'Brien writes lyrics that are both personal and strangely elliptical . . . Other poems are more anecdotal and grounded in humour. * Literary Review * In both technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic art, O'Brien is WH Auden's true inheritor. It is reassuring that poetry of this quality is still being written. * The Irish Times * Europa is an imaginative reorientation that reveals a truer picture of ourselves as Europeans, whether we like the fact or not. * The Herald * A sense of disorientation pervades Sean O' Brien's latest collection, in which the Hull-based poet scrutinises the Britain he knows and its coexistence with Europe - past, present and imaginary. His verse weaves with the familiar loss, madness and melancholy, to particularly powerful effect when he writes in the second person. -- Nilanjana Roy * Financial Times *