Europa

by Sean O'Brien

Europa, Sean O’Brien’s ninth collection of poems, is a timely and necessary book. Europe is not a place we can choose to it is also a shared heritage and an age-old state of being, a place where our common dreams, visions and nightmares recur and mutate. In placing our present crises in the context of an imaginative past, O’Brien show how our futures will be determined by what we choose to understand of our own European identity – as well as what we remember and forget of our shared history. Europa is a magisterial, grave and lyric work of from one of the finest poets of the it shows not just a Europe haunted by disaster and the threat of apocalypse, but an England where the shadows lengthen and multiply even in its most familiar and domestic corners. Europa, the poet reminds us, shapes the fate of everyone in these islands – even those of us who insist that they live elsewhere.

80 pages, Paperback

Published July 1, 2018

About the author

Sean O'Brien is a British poet, critic and playwright. Prizes he has won include the Eric Gregory Award (1979), the Somerset Maugham Award (1984), the Cholmondeley Award (1988), the Forward Poetry Prize (1995, 2001 and 2007) and the T. S. Eliot Prize (2007). He is one of only four poets (the others being Ted Hughes, John Burnside and Jason Allen-Paisant) to have won both the T. S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same collection of poems (The Drowned Book).
Born in London, England, O'Brien grew up in Hull, and was educated at Hymers College and Selwyn College, Cambridge. He has lived since 1990 in Newcastle upon Tyne, where he teaches at the university. He was the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor at St. Anne's College, Oxford, for 2016–17.

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent set of work from veteran poetic force, Sean O'Brien. He covers so many topics & sensitivities that it disappoints only in its predictable political cheer-leading for a busted flush that is the European Union.But then...in a modern democracy...we are all entitled to an opinion, aren't we?!

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Europa, the ninth and newest collection of poems from Sean O’Brien, is a post-Brexit poetic symphony, a sprawling and fractured reflection of the torn nation, its mythic continental past, its tumultuous present, its nightmarish future. Despite all this it somehow never lapses into hopelessness, finishing on the oddly optimistic triumph of ‘A Closed Book’: “let the others toil with doubt - for you had seen / The matter plain, and simply waited to begin”. This feels like the truest expression of the world we find ourselves in today, always on the cusp of some unfathomable change.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reflects more on the process of poetry writing, than the reflection on Europe and England that the blurb led me to expect. Very dense, lyrical writing.

[charlie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was fine and in some places well-crafted but didn’t blow me away or particularly resonate. Did really like “Zorn,” “Storm Beach,” and “World’s End.”

[Joe Avary · Rating 4 out of 5]

Will read more of his work