The Drowned Book

Sean O'Brien author Helen Dunmore editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Pan Macmillan

Published:18th Jun '15

Should be back in stock very soon

The Drowned Book cover

Picador's second collection from one of the finest English poets of the last fifty years

With an introduction by Helen Dunmore

Come for a walk down the river road,
For though you're all a long time dead
The waters part to let us pass

The way we'd go on summer nights
In the times we were children
And thought we were lovers.

The Drowned Book is a work of memory, commemoration and loss, dominated by elegies for those the author has loved and admired. Sean O'Brien's exquisite collection is powerfully affecting, sad and often deeply funny; but it is also a dramatically compelling book - disquieting, even - and full of warnings. As the book unfolds, O'Brien's verse occupies an increasingly dark, subterranean territory - where the waters are rising, threatening to overwhelm and ruin the world above.

Winner of both the T. S. Eliot and Forward prizes, The Drowned Book is an extraordinary collection, a classic from one of the leading poets of our time.

O'Brien's talent extends far beyond description . . . powerful, resonant and thought-provoking * Guardian *
It's almost as though he's seeing into a kind of pool in which the past is there, held in a sort of suspension . . . exhilarating -- Peter Porter

  • Winner of T. S. Eliot Prize 2008 (UK)
  • Winner of Forward Prize for Poetry Best Collection 2007 (UK)

ISBN: 9781447294030

Dimensions: 197mm x 130mm x 11mm

Weight: 150g

96 pages