SEAN O’BRIEN
The Drowned Book
Picador £8.99

MARY OLIVER
Thirst
Bloodaxe £8.95

BEN BOREK
Donjong Heights
Egg Box Press £12.99

There is history as the nightmare from which we are trying to awake and there is what Walter Benjamin thought was (along with happiness) ‘bound up with the image of redemption’. His Angel of History famously has his face turned toward the past. ‘Where we perceive a chain of events,’ says Benjamin, ‘he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.’ The Angel of History will have been staring Benjamin in the face at Portbou on the Portuguese border. But who was it said that one death was a tragedy but a million was a statistic? That was Stalin.

The big numbers of history and the small numbers of the self and its attachments are impossible to comprehend in a single thought, but we have to try. Furthermore, we have to try without turning the small numbers entirely into symbols, or at least not so far into symbols that their small intense singularity – the locus of life beyond tragedy – is lost.

In Sean O’Brien’s poem, ‘Proposal for a Monument to the Third International’, a dialogue between Solo and Chorus, the Chorus says:

We are buried alive.
We are not what was meant.
Let history finish.
Let stones become stars. Let the stars speak.

And the Solo voice replies:

Let those inside the walls of adamantine
Ice-cream reply in a deafening whisper
As ice writes its name in the river again.
History, history, what are our names?

What indeed are they? We see them sometimes. The dead are listed on stones and on enormous walls. Their faces look sadly out of photographs, their tongues move faintly in letters and postcards, their clothes circulate for a while along with their wealth or lack down a few generations. Then nothing. Or almost nothing.

O’Brien is, and always has been, a poet of history in much the same manner as Brodsky and Walcott, that is to say through range and engagement. It is a serious and honourable task attending to history, requiring ambition, humanity and skill. O’Brien possesses such qualities in plenty; in fact it is hard to think of another poet of his generation who is better fitted to providing an English historical perspective. His verse is authoritative, a fusion of Tony Harrison when he strides through his pentameters, of Peter Porter in the rapid movement of his ideas and the ability to clinch a phrase, and of Derek Mahon in his feeling for a tangible moral landscape. He also does a fine line in Swift’s saeva indignatio, in a manner half-Auden, half-Brecht, growling his way through hymns of curmudgeonly anger.

The dominant metaphor – in fact subject – of the first part of his new collection, The Drowned Book, is water, the water in which we drown, and in which we, like Prospero, drown our books too. It begins, however, not so much with water but a protest prefaced by a quotation from a George Monbiot article about someone who was arrested for ‘staring at a building’. That was in Hull, as it happens, and back in 2001. Monbiot’s article dealt chiefly with the ejection of the elderly protester, Walter Wolfgang, from the Labour Party conference in 2005. In O’Brien’s poem, ‘Fascists walk / Their little dogs before they go to pray / For the deliverance of Flanders from the French.’ The poem is set in Bruges where we find the ‘smallest Gothic window in the world’. The Fascists here are Flemish nationalists. The poem ends up addressing the ‘sir’ of the first line with an ironic apology, in the words ‘to you, whose only energy / Is fear that will forbid the world / Its momentary love and happenstance.’

That is a beautiful last line, and goes home to those vulnerable small numbers. The poem isn’t about Hull and it isn’t about Walter Wolfgang either. If it is about anything it is about Fascists and a hunch that they are winning. It says nothing about nationalism as such or the relationship between nationalism and fascism generally. That is not its business. It is about ‘the waterways of Europe’ that ‘run three wet dimensions’ through the poet’s sleep.

And so to water. Water runs wild and swallows everything. In the second poem, ‘Water-Gardens’, ‘Black-clad Victorians’ are feeding the river with souls. In the next we come upon open drains and ‘polio rivers’, together with The People newspaper and Diana Dors, both sturdy emblems of England. In the first part of the book we find ‘skeleton crews / Dancing hornpipes on islands of birdshit’, the ‘slimy malls’ of sewers, a coffin-boat (in memory of Barry MacSweeney), and a set of prose poems about rivers, culminating in ‘Grey Bayou’ where ‘the eternal flame to industry still burns / Tiny like a funerary torch’. The book also remembers Julia Darling and Michael Donaghy. The funerary torches burn.

Between Acheron and Styx, between John Martin and James BV Thomson, between Orgreave and the bridge where Eliot, with Dante, ‘had not thought death had undone so many’, the vision remains vigorously dystopian. O’Brien has, of course, been spending time with Dante so it is natural there should be this, let us say, overflow.

Prospero himself – regarded nowadays as one of the main symbols of colonialism – appears in a lightly but sharply ironic poem about attending a British Council function in Mauritius, ‘Symposium at St Louis’. In the poem Prospero is like some benevolent commonwealth official who ‘Might set to right the grievances / Of this extended family’. The British Council comment on this at the New Writing website is suitably diplomatic and de-ruffling, describing it as: ‘a dignified and perceptive poem that offers personal insights into a complex and beautiful island’.

Like hell, it does. The ‘complex and beautiful island’ is beside the point. The point is that ‘The afterlives of colonies / Are everywhere the same’, that there is a language – Creole in this case – that: says what people mean, Not what they ought and that:

says what people mean,
Not what they ought

and that:

There are items never mentioned:
Race and class and money
And the iron status quo...

The whole concludes in a passage that begins: ‘Let poison run back up the leaf’.

The keynote of The Drowned Book, as of all O’Brien’s books, is elegiac anger. Behind the Fascist dystopia lies a true state of being that is rooted in the righteous community, a kind of unspoken Utopia. The Utopia the righteous community might inhabit is not rooted in any place or time, for although we feel the loss of the industrial landscape as a form of nostalgia for community, there is no love for the powers that produced the landscape. Is the best time 1945, the best place being where Attlee is? Is it 1968 in Grosvenor Square or in Paris in May? Is it the memory of Working Men’s Clubs as conjured by Dennis Potter in, say, The Singing Detective? It is certainly a place of hymns and banners. It is the lost things, the drowned things, textures and tones, an appropriate sadness that is, ironically, 100 per cent English, so English that an immigrant or refugee will find himself oddly ancillary, ancillary as in the Latin, ancilla, a maid or hotel worker, some casual employee in a land he has come to precisely because it was not dystopian.

History on the one hand: nature on the other. Nurture against nature. Homo sapiens versus Gaia. Of the two nature tends to be more consoling if only because things in nature tend to come back, at least after a fashion. The Angel of Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but often puts a better face on things in the springs and summers of the soul. In Mary Oliver’s poetry it is always the spring and summer of the soul.

As she announces in the first line of the first poem in ‘Thirst’, ‘My work is loving the world’. It certainly is. The poem goes on: ‘Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – / equal seekers of sweetness.’

The poem arranges phoebe, delphinium, the sheep in the pasture, the moth, the wren, ‘the sleepy dug-up clam’, with such a determined air of positivity we positively glow with positiveness. Nor does the poet run out of energy. Everything’s coming up delphiniums all the time, right through the book, so why should not she? Her shoulders are ‘covered with stars’ in the second poem; willows, the honey locust, the beech, the oaks and the pines give off hints of gladness in the third. The trees stir and call out, ‘Stay awhile’. Should we stay? Why not? She does. In the third poem we learn that ‘every rose / opened in perfect sweetness / and lived / in gracious repose’. In the next, a prose poem titled ‘Musical Notation: 1’, we consider the pear orchard and the luna moth, but above all ‘a dog that adored flowers’ (don’t you just know dogs like that?) who would ‘sit down on his haunches’ for the whole show of sunsets, then come trotting home ‘in the alpenglow, that happy dog.’

Everyone is happy here. The ribbon snake has ‘nameless stars’ instead of eyes. A poem titled ‘When the Roses Speak, I Pay Attention’ ends: ‘Their fragrance all the while rising / from their blind bodies, making me / spin with joy.’ Just about everything does that though.

Any Constant Reader still reading might find him or herself at risk of following Dorothy Parker in the act of reading AA Milne’s Now We Are Six. Excess of joy can do that. Oliver feels ‘a longing for virtue, for company’. Should the reader, despite everything, still be tagging along, he or she might hear her pray, ‘oh Lord, let me be something / useful and unpretentious’ and mumble a heartfelt Amen.

Near the end of the book there is a poem called ‘The Poet Comments on Yet Another Approaching Spring’. Here the poet watches a mother choose:

exquisite ear-ornaments for someone
     beloved in the spring
          of her life; they were for her
               for sure, but it also seemed

a promise, a love-message, a commitment
     to all girls, and boys too, so
          beautiful and hopeful in this hard world
               and young.

Thirst is a book entirely without history, all spring and renewal and stars on shoulders. April is not the cruelest month after all. In fact, be assured, there is not one month, not a week, a day, an hour, a minute that is in the least cruel. The last poem in the book is also called ‘Thirst’. Sean O’Brien’s book has water and enough to spare. Mary Oliver needs some. A good glug of it might be a charitable act ‘in this hard world’.

Between the weight of history and the apparent weightlessness of nature there is the world of sheer stuff where people get born, get dressed, go to work or don’t go to work, listen to music, eat, drink, fall in love, fall ill and die. That is in fact what most people mostly do. Ben Borek’s Donjong Heights is a first book and while it is not the publisher’s first book, it is the first under new management (the poet Nathan Hamilton). I want to come dead clean on this: I taught Borek and saw the beginnings of Donjong Heights develop. At that stage I tried to persuade various publishers to take it on since I thought it was a remarkable piece of work. Now I find I don’t have to do that because Toby Litt has lauded it in Time Out, and has since then proclaimed it as one of his three books of the year on Radio Four.

About time. So what is it? Donjong Heights is a novel in Pushkinian sonnets – the form of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin – telling the story of a youngish man who is told he has a mysterious but fatal disease that entails the heart slowing down until it stops. He lives in ‘Sarf’ London in a rundown block of flats called Donjong Heights (hence the title of the poem) and, since he is resigned to dying, blows £3,000 of Lloyd’s money on a new suit, food and drink and one grand secular Christmas Party to which he invites friends and other tenants, including the teenage gangsta-rapping Tyrone, the white Rasta girl Hylie, a disgraced academic John and his friend known as Lord Byron, plus Antonio, his tailor, his own wrestler brother (the enormous Chester), and his lost love, Cat. Every so often the story’s Omniscient Narrator breaks in with his very bad lisp to inform us of the true thtate of things:

He hathn’t honoured, rarely weeping
Hith parent’th long-thincw thcattered dutht.
He’d rather jutht continue thleeping.
But now ath death drawth clothe, he mutht,
As fate’th mythteriouth purpoth burrowth,
Reap a brief harvetht on their furrowth...

The whole begins like this:

South London has its reputation:
No tube, a multitude of guns,
And hence this Johnsonesque quotation:
‘When Peckham tires one simply runs
On up to Hoxton and carouses
In trendy nouveau-cool warehouses
And listens to Enectro Funk
Affecting toned down retro-punk.’
Don’t get me wrong, it’s no Soweto
Down south, it’s not all crack and pillage –
Just take a look at Dulwich Village –
But for the common man it’s Netto
Not Conran, tea not mochaccino
And Asda jeans, not Valentino.

There is, of course, a history of verse novels, after Pushkin. Byron’s Beppo and Don Juan (the finest comic poem in the English language) about the same time, past Clough’s Amours de Voyage, through John Fuller’s The Illusionists, Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate and beyond, works by Ranjit Bolt and, also current and also in Pushkinesques, Andy Croft’s Ghost Writer. Borek’s stands comparison with any of the recent works, and nods directly to Pushkin, Byron and Vikram Seth while being utterly of its time.

And therein lies its power. The form is handled with real virtuosity, but that would mean little if the whole thing was simply whimsy. The poem is funny and sad (it is, after all, about dying) but packed full of life, the history of Hip Hop, the various kinds of marijuana, knowledge and love of literature, of fashion, of food and drink and of what it means to cling to, yet to leave life. The whole is beautifully told as a story, and the best of it is sheer delight in language that mixes high and low with ease and invention and keeps the spirit high throughout. It is also richly illustrated and hardbound.

If this sounds like an advertisement it is because the book fills me with delight, especially delight now that it is published and praised by others, as it should have been long ago. It is hard to understand publishers sometimes, but eventually if something is good enough – or so we hope – it eventually appears.

George Szirtes’ book of poems Reel (Bloodaxe) won the TS Eliot Prize in 2004. His New and Collected Poems will be published by Bloodaxe in 2008, together with John Sears’ study of his work.

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