In one of his earliest poems, “Walking”, Sean O’Brien wrote “I am in love with detail”; and indeed, one of the strengths of this now formidable poet has been a realist’s attention to the rendering of particulars, the evocation of place and mood, which only gradually builds up to an almost symbolist vision of class, history and politics. Over his four volumes to date, O’Brien’s style, piling up line on line of minute specifics, stretching syntax sometimes almost to breaking, has become ever more seductive, rhythmically as well as rhetorically. Ghost Train, which shows an exhilarating metrical sophistication, is an extension of these strategies, and there are no thematic surprises; but there are signs that O’Brien’s scepticism has been turned at least partly from his subject matter on to his own handling of it.
“Walking” also contained the line “all this is England, / Just left here and what’s to be done?”, and the question, though phrased more discreetly, has haunted O’Brien’s work. His various sojourns in Hull, Newcastle, Sussex and Dundee enabled him to write poems expressing a Larkinesque disappointment which was as much the result of political disaffection as a simply existential dread. The poems were also interspersed with overtly political and satirical ballads, a suitably confrontational and working-class form; but it was the long pieces which expressed a sense of limitation and loss which was both personal and political, located in maritime cities which became symbols of the potential for movement and escape and yet exemplified stasis and decline.
The first poem in Ghost Train, “Somebody Else”, begins with the sketching of comfortable, apparently untroubled suburbia, before breaking off to declare that “Merely to think of / The ground-cover detail this outline implies… / Would blind you”. What replaces an autistically perfect account of the terrain is an archetype England, “the good place unencumbered by meaning”. Detail is no longer required because “this place is endlessly repeated”. O’Brien is offering a land of sleepy afternoons – the Orwellian deep, deep sleep of England as adopted by John Major – in a spirit of weary acceptance. Where once such mythic cartographies seemed part of a “conspiracy… that needs a mask of leaves and rain”, as he once put it, O’Brien now offers a more unsettling suggestion:
You search the catalogue
Of the Festival of Britain
Repeatedly for evidence of you
And think it must have been mislaid.
When will you learn? What could it mean,
Conspiracy, when everyone conspires
Against themselves and does not know it?
For in his previous work, O’Brien did seem to believe, in the tradition of his fellow Hull poet Douglas Dunn, that the excluded and apparently conspired against could find representation, however surreally or pessimistically, in his work. In Ghost Train, the promises of ports have been replaced by the landlocked limits of railway stations; and the train becomes a vehicle for O’Brien to explore an England in which history is merely a theme-park, and even the train is an anachronism, its poetic freight – “Adelstrop”, say, or Larkin’s “Here” or “The Whitsun Weddings” – a shadow of reality. In a virtuoso series of railway poems, everyone becomes a ghost; the figures and places of O’Brien’s 1950s childhood, so movingly picked out in his previous work, are suddenly disconnected from the quietistic, defeated consensus of the 1990s, and the 1950s become a “white other city / I can’t recall leaving, or ever re-enter”. In “Revenants”, the dead of the post-war settlement are themselves haunted by “the England / We speak for, which finds you / No home for the moment or ever”. A theme park steam revival is “an apology, forty years late, / For a government exiled to history”; and the word “exile” is most telling, for O’Brien has consistently attempted to place his subjects, however subtly, in a context of historic possibility. In this volume, there is no meaningful connection with the past, and this is itself a tacit comment on the past sixteen years of political change in this country.
The volume begins, apparently mid-idea, with the line “In fact you are secretly somebody else”; and while O’Brien’s remarkable and entertaining imagination is given free rein, one is never in any doubt that the double lives conjured up in the volume are merely imaginary. The clichés of literature and film represent the desire for narrative, purpose, significance; and, in fact, they can only be imagined as happening or able to happen to somebody else; “the other life, the properly narrated one, / You glimpse through flying carriages”. And so the imaginary detail is offered and then effaced: “It smells / Like your big sister’s hairspray, supposing / She’d used it, or even existed”; “Plain facts of the matter / Which do not respond, being absent themselves”. Every richly imagined scenario threatens constantly to dissolve, to become strangely intangible.
O’Brien once said that “there are certain things which I hold to be somehow English, but they’re all inventions. They are largely cultural products, works of art, or forms of entertainment, often of a propagandist nature.” It is as if, in this latest work, O’Brien has become so sceptical of producing a version of England which would not also be a “suspect invention”, a collaboration with the propagandist myth, that he has elected instead to demonstrate and undermine that process. He does so with such wit that by the end of the volume he can note “the exhaustion of my early promise / In mannered elaboration of the same few / Arid tropes”. The promise exhausted is not aesthetic but political; and it is a mild irony that a book which takes O’Brien’s familiar disappointment and dispossession to such alarming extremes should also be his most beautiful, amusing and effective to date.