|
Showing 1 - 25 of
46 matches in All Departments
|
Embark (Paperback)
Sean O'Brien
|
R299
R234
Discovery Miles 2 340
Save R65 (22%)
|
Ships in 11 - 16 working days
|
A new collection by Sean O’Brien – ‘Auden’s true
inheritor’, and one of our wisest poetic chronographers – is
not just a literary event, but also, invariably, a reckoning of the
times. Given the nature of our times, his voice is an essential
one: there is no other poet currently writing with O’Brien’s
intellectual authority, historical literacy and sheer command of
the facts. Embark also registers our unique cultural climacteric,
where the larger crises of the planet – the pandemic and the
terrifying spectre of revanchist nationalism among them – impact
all of us, and where the illusion of a church-and-state separation
of the personal and political can no longer hold. As the poet turns
seventy, he shows us how the inevitable absences that age brings
are assuaged by how we furnish them; the result is not just a logic
made from loss and pain, but a music, a metaphysic, and finally a
redemptive art. Embark reminds us of the enduring consolations of
love, of friendship, of the freedoms and possible futures still
afforded by the imagination – and, through O’Brien’s own
exemplary model, of poetry itself.
|
White House Clubhouse
Sean O'Brien
|
R470
R384
Discovery Miles 3 840
Save R86 (18%)
|
Ships in 9 - 15 working days
|
Marissa and Clara’s mom is the newly elected president of the
United States and they haven’t experienced much freedom lately.
While exploring the White House they discover a hidden tunnel that
leads to an underground clubhouse full of antique curiosities,
doors heading in all directions—and a mysterious invitation to
join the ranks of White House kids. So they sign the pledge.
Suddenly, the lights go out and Marissa and Clara find themselves
at the White House in 1903. There they meet Quentin, Ethel, Archie
and Alice, the irrepressible children of President Theodore
Roosevelt. To get back home, Marissa and Clara must team up with
the Roosevelt children “to help the president” and “to make a
difference”. White House Clubhouse is a thrilling and hilarious
adventure that takes readers on an action-packed, cross-country
railroad trip, back to the dawn of the twentieth century and the
larger-than-life president at the country’s helm.
|
Otherwise
Sean O'Brien
|
R199
Discovery Miles 1 990
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
A new sequence of poems by Sean O'Brien, winner of both the T.S.
Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize. The season is high summer, the
hour is late, ‘in the high numbers’, the place is one where
roots remain deep, but at the same time it grows unrecognisable —
a terrain vague steadily absenting itself from human memory. Love
holds it all together, preserving a sense of expectancy and
promise, an intuition of immanence in the everyday. Sean O’Brien
is one of the leading poets of our age and these poems show him at
his best: a pitch-perfect lyricism, an unflinching vision of the
world as it is and as it could be, a truth-telling humour that is
both gentle and ruthless.
Stephen Maxwell has just retired from a lifetime spent teaching
history at his alma mater. As he writes the official history of
Blake's, a minor public school steeped in military tradition, he
also reveals how, forty years ago, a secret conflict dating from
the Second World War re-enacted itself among staff and pupils, when
fascism once more made its presence felt in the school and the
city, with violent and nightmarish results.
Platonic love is a concept that has profoundly shaped Western
literature, philosophy and intellectual history for centuries.
First developed in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, it was taken up
by subsequent thinkers in antiquity, entered the theological
debates of the Middle Ages, and played a key role in the reception
of Neoplatonism and the etiquette of romantic relationships during
the Italian Renaissance. In this wide-ranging reference work, a
leading team of international specialists examines the Platonic
distinction between higher and lower forms of eros, the role of the
higher form in the ascent of the soul and the concept of Beauty.
They also treat the possibilities for friendship and interpersonal
love in a Platonic framework, as well as the relationship between
love, rhetoric and wisdom. Subsequent developments are explored in
Plutarch, Plotinus, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Aquinas,
Ficino, della Mirandola, Castiglione and the contra amorem
tradition.
How was the world generated and how does matter continue to be
ordered so that the world can continue functioning? Questions like
these have existed as long as humanity has been capable of rational
thought. In antiquity, Plato's Timaeus introduced the concept of
the Demiurge, or Craftsman-god, to answer them. This lucid and
wide-ranging book argues that the concept of the Demiurge was
highly influential on the many discussions operating in Middle
Platonist, Gnostic, Hermetic and Christian contexts in the first
three centuries AD. It explores key metaphysical problems such as
the origin of evil, the relationship between matter and the First
Principle and the deployment of ever-increasing numbers of
secondary deities to insulate the First Principle from the sensible
world. It also focuses on the decreasing importance of demiurgy in
Neoplatonism, with its postulation of procession and return.
How was the world generated and how does matter continue to be
ordered so that the world can continue functioning? Questions like
these have existed as long as humanity has been capable of rational
thought. In antiquity, Plato's Timaeus introduced the concept of
the Demiurge, or Craftsman-god, to answer them. This lucid and
wide-ranging book argues that the concept of the Demiurge was
highly influential on the many discussions operating in Middle
Platonist, Gnostic, Hermetic and Christian contexts in the first
three centuries AD. It explores key metaphysical problems such as
the origin of evil, the relationship between matter and the First
Principle and the deployment of ever-increasing numbers of
secondary deities to insulate the First Principle from the sensible
world. It also focuses on the decreasing importance of demiurgy in
Neoplatonism, with its postulation of procession and return.
In this innovative series of public lectures at Newcastle
University, leading contemporary poets speak about the craft and
practice of poetry to audiences drawn from both the city and the
university. The lectures are then published in book form by
Bloodaxe, giving readers everywhere the opportunity to learn what
the poets themselves think about their own subject. Where and what
is the England in which we imagine we live? How do we authenticate
this never-to-be-finished project? What are its imaginative
origins, and how do contemporary poets stand in relation to those
predecessors such as Eliot, Auden, Larkin and Hughes whose
imaginary Englands have left such an imprint on the culture?
Journeys to the Interior considers the work of a range of
contemporary poets, including Peter Didsbury, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul
Farley, Roy Fisher, Daljit Nagra, Jo Shapcott and George Szirtes,
examining areas of dissent and signs of affirmation. Can England be
seen as, in Langland's words, 'a fair field full of folk'? Is
Englishness a matter of 'complicated shame', as Jo Shapcott put it?
How do those born elsewhere who have made their homes here describe
the experience of England? And if, as Auden said, 'all the poet can
do is warn', what warning signs are poets receiving and
transmitting in this period of doubt and anxiety?
Each poem in Sean O'Brien's superb new collection opens on a wholly
different room, vista or landscape, each drawn with the poet's
increasingly refined sense of tone, history and rhetorical
assurance. The Beautiful Librarians is a stock-taking of sorts, and
a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our culture,
often overlooked by both capital and official account. Here we find
infantrymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar - but none more
heroic than the librarians of the title, those silent and silencing
guardians of literature and knowledge who, the poet reminds us,
also had lives of their own to be celebrated. Elsewhere we find a
12-bar blues sung by Ovid, a hymn to a grey rose, a writing course
from hell, and a very French exercise in waiting. A book of
terrific variety of theme and form, The Beautiful Librarians is
another bravura performance from the most garlanded English poet of
his generation.
Stephen Maxwell has just retired from a lifetime spent teaching
history at his alma mater. As he writes the official history of
Blake's, a minor public school steeped in military tradition, he
also reveals how, forty years ago, a secret conflict dating from
the Second World War re-enacted itself among staff and pupils, when
fascism once more made its presence felt in the school and the
city, with violent and nightmarish results.
Europa, Sean O'Brien's ninth collection of poems, is a timely and
necessary book. Europe is not a place we can choose to leave: 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 from one of the finest poets of the age: 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.
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.
This collection, drawing on almost forty years of verse, represents
the definitive guide to one of the leading English poets working
today. It will allow the reader the chance to survey both the
remarkable variety and the consistent quality of O'Brien's work, as
well as the enduring strength of his obsessions: these have helped
create a tone and a landscape as immediately recognizable as those
of MacNeice, Larkin or Eliot. O'Brien's hells and heavens,
underworlds and urban dystopias, trains and waterways have formed
the imaginative theatre for his songs, satires, pastorals and
elegies; throughout, the poems demonstrate O'Brien's astonishing
flair for the dramatic line, where he has inherited the mantle of
W. H. Auden. Also included are selections from both O'Brien's
dramatic writing and his acclaimed version of the Inferno.
It Says Here is Sean O'Brien's follow-up to his celebrated
collection Europa, and has a vision as rich and wide-ranging as its
predecessor. Set against shorter, ruthlessly focused pieces -
vicious and scabrous political sketches and satires charting the
growth of extremism and the disintegration of democracy - are
meditations on the imaginative life, dream and remembrance, time
and recurrence. There are elegies for friends and fellow poets;
paranoiac, brooding pastorals; other poems lay bare the maddening
trials of a historically literate mind as it attempts to navigate a
world gone post-content, post-intellectual, and at times
post-memory. At the centre of the book is the long poem
Hammersmith, a shadowy, cinematic dream-vision of England during
and since the Second World War. Here, O'Brien charts a
psychogeographic journey through the English countryside and the
haunted precincts of London, mapping a labyrinth of love, madness
and lost history. The result is a stirring, illuminating document
of a time of immense societal flux and upheaval by one of our
finest poets and most insightful cultural commentators. 'In both
technical mastery and his belief in the seriousness of the poetic
art, O'Brien is WH Auden's true inheritor.' Irish Times
|
Poems (Paperback)
Corsino Fortes; Translated by Sean O'Brien, Daniel Hahn
|
R126
Discovery Miles 1 260
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
|
November (Paperback)
Sean O'Brien
1
|
R304
R238
Discovery Miles 2 380
Save R66 (22%)
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
November is Sean O'Brien's first collection since his widely
celebrated The Drowned Book, the only book of poetry to have won
both the Forward and T. S. Eliot prizes. November is haunted by the
missing, the missed, the vanished, the uncounted, and the
uncountable lost: lost sleep, connections, muses, books, the ghosts
and gardens of childhood. Ultimately, these lead the poet to
contemplate the most troubling absences: O'Brien's elegies for his
parents and friends form the heart of this book, and are the source
of its pervasive note of depart. Elsewhere - as if a French window
stood open to an English room - the islands, canals, railway
stations and undergrounds of O'Brien's landscape are swept by a
strikingly Gallic air. This new note lends O'Brien's recent poems a
reinvigorated sense of the imaginative possible: November shows
O'Brien at the height of his powers, with his intellect and
imagination as gratifyingly restless as ever.
The last major battle of the Civil War at Fort Blakely, Alabama, on
April 9, 1865, was quickly overshadowed by the concurrent surrender
of Robert E. Lee's army at Appomattox, and is largely forgotten
today. And yet the Federal campaign against Mobile, the last
important Southern city that remained in Rebel hands, was a
significant military operation involving 45,000 Union soldiers and
9,000 Confederates. Faced with overwhelming odds, diehard Rebels
refused to surrender, and--even with the end of the war clearly at
hand--Federal soldiers remained willing to fight and die to capture
the last enemy stronghold. O'Brien explores the battle and the
driving forces behind it in the first comprehensive treatment of
the campaign in over 130 years. The Mobile campaign sheds light on
the workings of unit cohesion in the closing days of the war--a
bond of loyalty forged by four years of hardships, with soldiers no
longer fighting just for country or cause but for their own band of
comrades. Black solders (ten percent of the Federal army in the
Mobile campaign) were further motivated by another factor: to end
slavery and to prove African Americans worthy of equality. Soldiers
in this campaign faced the full fury of America's war-making
science, with innovations like trench warfare, rifled artillery,
land and naval mines, army-navy amphibious operations, submarines,
and minesweeping operations--all new technologies to be perfected
by a later generation in World War I.
'This is the night mail crossing the border, Bringing the cheque
and the postal order...' -- W.H. Auden Wordsworth was the first
laureate of locomotives: in fact he railed against them, and
against the consequent opening up of the Lakes to holiday hordes
('On the Projected Kendal and Windermere Railway'). His dismay was
echoed down the decades by disturbed ruralists, and yet the train
has become part of our psychic landscape: some of the best-loved
English poems - Edward Thomas's 'Adlestrop', or Philip Larkin's
'Whitsun Weddings' - have celebrated carriages, platforms and
waiting rooms, while locomotion has inspired some of the most
characteristic poetry of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Stevenson,
Hardy and MacNeice, Betjeman and Auden (whose 'Night Mail' was
written to accompany a 1930s GPO documentary about the postal
express from Euston to Glasgow). Co-edited by two of our most
distinguished poets, Train Songs offers a round tour - from
Wordsworth to Hugo Williams and beyond - starting from the poetry
of departures and brief encounters, but taking in the American
Blues, the troop trains of two world wars, and the addiction to
speed which characterised the European revolutions. Trains have
carried the freight of history from the Industrial Revolution
onwards - the Armstice in 1918 was signed in a railway carriage,
the death camps were organised around train timetables - and this
new anthology shows how the train in all its forms has exercised a
unique hold upon our collective unconscious.
|
|