Perceptive and darkly funny poetry from the Forward-prize-winning poet.
While Downriver contains the English urban pastoral and hymns to the Northern deities for which Sean O'Brien is justly celebrated, the poet has always been more a singer than even his many admirers have sometimes conceded: here, that lyric note is sounded more openly than ever before.
With Downriver, his fifth collection, O'Brien has produced his most various and mature work yet. This is a poetry of both delicacy and gravity, assuagement as well as agitation, rivers that start in hell but later fall as rain - and will only strengthen his reputation as one of the most gifted English poets at work today. Sean O'Brien has written seven collections of poetry. The Drowned Book (2007) won the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes.Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-2001 appeared in 2002. His other work includes the book of essays The Deregulated Muse(1998), the verse plays The Birds (2002) and Keepers of the Flame (2003) and a verse translation of Dante's Inferno (2006). In 2008 his collection of short stories, The Silence Room, was published, followed in 2009 by his novel Afterlife. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.
