"You can't get there from here, but if you could, you'd have to take the train." Ghost Train, Sean O'Brien's fourth collection of poems, rides the network of routes into history, politics, autobiography, and the imaginative region where they meet. The tone of this new collection is no longer angry and political--a departure from his previous works, The Indoor Park, The Frighteners, and HMS Glasshouse--but has become almost elegiac and celebratory, sombre and "romantic." His most subtle work to date, the poems are not mellow and accepting of a post-Thatcherite Britain, but more aghast and troubled. O'Brien's writing is traditional in style, but he deploys an altogether contemporary vocabulary and his sense of rhythm is paramount. This is a moving book.
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