Bonfire Party

The preoccupations of Sean O’Brien’s recent work have for many of us become newly pressing: the recurrence of history, the shadow of war, the precariousness of a peacetime that can no longer be taken for granted. The Bonfire Party, O’Brien’s twelfth collection, takes its title from Eric Ravilious’s 1930s painting, where some revellers watch the flames, while others feed them or run towards them, in a scene of ‘mythic Englishness’. In these poems, the long view afforded by experience results in a truer representation of our predicament and a regretful understanding of human culpability.Just as times and places flow together to create a shifting, at times visionary perspective, so too do the presences of those we have lost, ‘love and death consorting as they must’. In a central sequence – a departure for O’Brien – he writes into the rich imaginative climate of George Simenon’s Maigret novels. These poems, both ‘homage and transposition’, effect a poetic communion of sorts with the physical world and moral atmospheres encountered by the inscrutable detective and his creator.The working of the imagination itself has become O’Brien’s true subject, where the fact of the world and the imagined order of literature and art begin to merge.

Sean O’Brien’s twelve collections of poetry include The Drowned Book, Europa, Embark and The Bonfire Party. His work has received awards including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, and most recently the 2020 Beijing Literature and Arts Network Award for Poetry for lifetime achievement. His other work includes fiction, drama, criticism and translation. In 2020 his translation of the Collected Poems of the Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbayuli was published, and in 2021 he edited Alistair Elliot’s This is the Life: Selected Poems. His poems have been widely translated. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.