LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

SEAN O’BRIEN (b. 1952) writes poems stifled with incidents, poems ‘with no way in’ (Kanji). He is a shy sentimental. He poses as the rough poet who can take everything that comes his way. His reader has to take the burdens with him. In his poetry we witness a time when ‘all the world rewrites itself’ (The Grammar School Ghost), when the poet records everything with a conversational vocabulary and very concentrated images at the same time. The contradiction in Sean O’Brien’s poetry – Desperado from that point of view – is that cold, frowning images conceal a warm, frightened sensibility.

by VIC (Cristina Ioana Vianu)