The Beautiful Librarians

by Sean O'Brien

Overview

Each poem in Sean O'Brien's superb new collection opens on a wholly different room, vista or landscape, each drawn with the poet's increasingly refined sense of tone, history and rhetorical assurance. The Beautiful Librarians is a stock-taking of sorts, and a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our culture, often overlooked by both capital and official account. Here we find infantrymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar - but none more heroic than the librarians of the title, those silent and silencing guardians of literature and knowledge who, the poet reminds us, also had lives of their own to be celebrated. Elsewhere we find a 12-bar blues sung by Ovid, a hymn to a grey rose, a writing course from hell, and a very French exercise in waiting. A book of terrific variety of theme and form, The Beautiful Librarians is another bravura performance from the most garlanded English poet of his generation.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781447287506
Publisher:	Pan Macmillan
Publication date:	03/12/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	271 KB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Sean O'Brien is a poet, critic, playwright, broadcaster, anthologist and editor. He grew up in Hull and now lives in Newcastle upon Tyne; he is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The Drowned Book won both the Forward Prize for best collection and the T S Eliot Prize. His most recent collection, November, was shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award, the T S Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize.
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.