Juniper

These are poems of journey and movement, of arrivals and departures, greetings and farewells. Soldiers come home from war, old friends are parted. The only stillness is death. The human past is etched into the natural landscape as the living watch and listen to the continuously changing moment they find themselves in, which in turn is pressed into history by the relentless insistence of time: ‘there was before, there will be after, no half-measures.’ ‘Sean O’Brien’s work combines an almost documentary realism with mythical patterning. The world capsizes from surface into depth, depth into surface, as if the present tense was a trap-door into a deeper, darker longue durée. His subject is the uneasy truce between past and present, and in Juniper he traces History to its vanishing-point in ordinary lives, in poems that are both richly imagined and true to their people, their times and places. His is a voice that reminds us what poetry can still be and do for a culture.’ Patrick McGuinness