November Av Sean O'Brien

<i>November</i> is Sean O’Brien’s first collection since his widely celebrated <i>The Drowned Book</i>, the only book of poetry to have won both the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. <i>November</i> 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 <i>départ</i>. 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: <i>November</i> shows O’Brien at the height of his powers, with his intellect and imagination as gratifyingly restless as ever.