Books by Sean O'Brien

A new collection by Sean O'Brien - 'Auden's true inheritor', and one of our wisest poetic chronographers - is not just a literary event, but also, invariably, a reckoning of the times. Given the nature of our times, his voice is an essential one: there is no other poet currently writing with O'Brien's intellectual authority, historical literacy and sheer command of the facts. Embark also registers our unique cultural climacteric, where the larger crises of the planet - the pandemic and the terrifying spectre of revanchist nationalism among them - impact all of us, and where the illusion of a church-and-state separation of the personal and political can no longer hold. As the poet turns seventy, he shows us how the inevitable absences that age brings are assuaged by how we furnish them; the result is not just a logic made from loss and pain, but a music, a metaphysic, and finally a redemptive art. Embark reminds us of the enduring consolations of love, of friendship, of the freedoms and possible futures still afforded by the imagination - and, through O'Brien's own exemplary model, of poetry itself.

The last major battle of the Civil War, the Federal campaign against Mobile, the last Southern city that remained in rebel hands, was a military operation involving 45,000 Union soldiers and 9000 Confederates. This work provides a treatment of the campaign.

A brilliant collection from T S Eliot prize-winning poet Sean O'Brien

En route to colonize the extrasolar planet Tau Ceti III...Donn Cardenio, damaged veteran of Earth's disastrous first interstellar war, and two hundred fellow Caretakers are charged with caring for a quarter million embryos en route to colonize the extrasolar planet Tau Ceti III.Cardenio considers this assignment a chance to redeem himself from the ravages of the past great war.But, when one of his Caretaker colleagues snaps, Cardenio is forced to begin an investigation that leads to more questions than answers - questions about his relationship with his lover, his own past, and the nature of the mission he's on.Unfortunately for Cardenio, nothing is as it appears. His fellow Caretakers do not share his reverence for the lives in their charge; friends and lovers hide vital truths; and his enemies and rivals become allies.By the end of the mission, Donn Cardenio will confront the terrible reality of what he's done to determine how the future will unfold.

Asteroid belt miner Collier South is on the brink. The once-exciting frontier of space has been overtaken by corporate creep, and he stands as one of the last independent beltrunners in the system. Almost squeezed out of the only life he's ever known by impersonal conglomerates and a vindictive ex-lover, he's desperate for a strike. But what he finds this time has the power to change his life forever. Worse, it has the power to change the fate of the entire system, and the corporations are on a hunt to pry it from his stubborn fingers.

This collection from award-winning poet Sean O'Brien tackles England and its relationship with Europe through their tangled history and into the uncertain future.

Pez and Eck are on the hunt for the perfect society in "a city where free men might live like birds". But when they start building the bird city for real, Pez starts to have ambitions. As the fantasy utopia threatens to turn into a tyrany, the birds start to rebel.

A brilliant new thriller about poetry and fascism

The seventies. Summer. Four students in a cottage in the middle of nowhere. Two young American women, one hell-bent on destruction. Alcohol, LSD, sex, jealousy, infidelity and poetry. At the end of the summer, one of the four students will be dead, and another will be destroyed by his inability to let go of past memories, guilt and bitterness. 'A cracker' Evening Standard 'Chills to the bone' Independent on Sunday 'Rich and powerful' Daily Mail 'Afterlife positively throbs with loss . . . It's a deeply absorbing novel that lingers in the mind like the ghosts it so ardently evokes' Claire Kilroy Irish Times 'A richly rewarding portrait of friendships under siege, full of vibrant characters and atmospheres that linger in the mind and the heart' Sunday Telegraph

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.

Stephen Maxwell has just retired from a lifetime spent teaching history at his alma mater. As he writes the official history of Blake's, a minor public school steeped in military tradition, he also reveals how, forty years ago, a secret conflict dating from the Second World War re-enacted itself among staff and pupils, when fascism once more made its presence felt in the school and the city, with violent and nightmarish results.

The seldom-recalled Creek War of 1813-1814 and its extension, the First Seminole War of 1818, had significant consequences for the growth of the United States.

Mountain Partisans penetrates the shadowy world of Union and Confederate guerrillas, describes their leaders and bloody activities, and explains their effect on the Civil War and the culture of Appalachia. Although it did not alter the outcome of the war, guerrilla conflict affected the way the war was fought.

November is Sean O'Brien's first collection since his widely celebrated The Drowned Book, the only book of poetry to have won both the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. November is haunted by the missing, the missed, the vanished, the uncounted, and the uncountable lost: lost sleep, connections, muses, books, the ghosts and gardens of childhood. Ultimately, these lead the poet to contemplate the most troubling absences: O'Brien's elegies for his parents and friends form the heart of this book, and are the source of its pervasive note of depart. Elsewhere - as if a French window stood open to an English room - the islands, canals, railway stations and undergrounds of O'Brien's landscape are swept by a strikingly Gallic air. This new note lends O'Brien's recent poems a reinvigorated sense of the imaginative possible: November shows O'Brien at the height of his powers, with his intellect and imagination as gratifyingly restless as ever.

Three lectures on contemporary British poets and their relationship with England, its history, politics and culture, and with the continuing tradition of English poetry.

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.

A generous new selection from the only poet to have won the prestigious Forward Prize twice