Michael O’Brien

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Biographical note:  Michael O’Brien was born in Granville, NY in 1939; studied at Fordham, the University of Paris, and Columbia; worked as a librarian; was one of the Eventorium poets, where his first book was published in 1967; taught at Brooklyn and Hunter; worked for many years editing technical publications; wrote The Summer Poems, Conversations at the West End, Blue Springs, Veil, Hard Rain, The Ruin, The Floor and the Breath, 17 Songs, At Schoodic, Sills, Six Poems, Swift Moons Repair Celestial Losses, and Sleeping and Waking. He lives in New York.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844715626
ISBN:  9781844715626
Author:  Michael O’Brien
Title:  Sills
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  28-Apr-09
Extent:  148pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  222 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  NP
Price:  GBP 9.99
Price:  USD 15.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Sills gathers together poems from four of O’Brien’s early books and combines them with later work, forming a selection from 1960-1999. O'Brien writes, “The poems dance their dance of stillness and motion. The issue is a quiet, patterned music, animated, disciplined, ecstatic; not closure, but recognition.”

This new edition provides the reader with the best introduction to O’Brien’s work, a poet hailed as a modern master of the lyric form and a poet of genuine significance in the American canon.

Table of contents:
The Falls
The Room
Summer
During Sickness
Persephone
Sunday
Window
Waking
“the child’s secret, who you sit down next to”
“from mayday to solstice, parades”
Skin
Crossing
Another Sunday
Postcard
Jean Arp
Deathmask: Heine
Swan
“I come out, see my shadow, go back to sleep”
For Ruth
“Eurydice, forget me not”
“nullity is cinelinear, the calliopes of surrealism”
Half Moon
The Note
Early March
Rimbaud
Brooklyn
“reason & evening: a phonebooth”
“a cage of need, a dream”
“between babytalk & ‘the Odyssey of Geist’”
“A dream of reason calm as a garden”
“Ophelia’s ghost, like an unimproved road”
After a Cadence of Hart Crane
In Fever
Jackstraws
Perceptual Difficulties
song & image
Marcel Duchamp
Four Choruses
The Days
Postcards from Nambe
East Branch
Three California Poems
Finistere
“The song the torso sings”
Sundown
Cassis
The Passenger
The Days, Again
Earring
“The split seed-pods of the grass”
“Monk had his Baroness like Rilke”
“The world and its likeness”
Four Places
“the dandy you pass in the intersection”
The Terms
The Loom
In the Elevator
Damage
Radio
Echocardiogram
Lives of the Saints
A Translation
Chambers Street
Amulet
Angels
Memory
From an Anthology
Formals & Bridals
4 Songs
Rain
Stones
Rubric
Achill Island
Winter
At Schoodic
14 Songs
A Pillow-Book
The Instructions
Arthur Dove
In Memory of Frank Kuenstler
For Iso & Susan
Trains Going By
Late August
Applecross
A Quarry
Stations
“Horses standing in rain”

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Excerpt from book:  

Half Moon

the crazy sun
all our lives singular
(rhymes like shadows)

the day’s heave
the steep bells
on the way to everywhere else

“human language is humiliation & madness”
on 9th St. a secret rain
the mumbled buildings

wit like hockey
these obstacles
a tourniquet of smoke

charm
the ghost of a form
“senseless as nature”

a postcard
a check
down the river

every candle a commodity
& drunken valentine
o shepherd

the homage is the massacre
the printing-press, the floating loan
& compost, memoir

turns, a leaf at a time
A Journey to the North Country
four-legged haiku, cranes, a day

& a day, fabulous twin cities
the chances
ambition’s crapgame will never abolish

reader, any book, any October

Unpublished endorsement:  No other poet now writing is more alert from word to word or registers the world with Michael O’Brien’s oblique precision. Sills is a large event: our first comprehensive look at a neglected American master.

August Kleinzahler

Unpublished endorsement:  In a way that few contemporary books of poetry can claim to be, Sills is an authentic companion to living, in the midst of radios, waiting rooms, ferryboats, eyelids, fine rain, and everything else to which this poetry is constantly awake.

Geoffrey O’Brien

Unpublished endorsement:  Some writers expand, others contract. Over the years O’Brien has pared his poetry to essentials. He shapes this matter in many forms, and the resulting music is declarative, terse, and elegant. No ornament blurs the reader’s intense pleasure.

William Corbett

Unpublished endorsement:  Sills, perches, diacritical perspectives on a late world as seen from its very edge: the poetry of Michael O’Brien teeters between the given and the intuited, the perceived and the proposed. As with all significant creative works, his is born of an inherent contradiction. What O’Brien’s eye catches in its relentless observation of an exhausted age (“the rain washing the world away”), his ear, his wonderfully keen lyric acuity, as if refutes, offers up an alternative of its own. (“A vowel/to ride on” or later, “Little bones of/the ear, house built/of air.”) Speech, in these beautifully executed poems,comes to the rescue of substance. “To live high, up among the cornices, from exception to exception, hearing an earthly music” is, ultimately, what Sills is about.

Gustaf Sobin

Review quote:  Memory finally connects everything with everything, as if the world were an immense pun: a broadside, against the grain, every synapse firing. O’Brien records this pun with a verve and zeal that is both remarkably fresh and reliably consistent. His wit and speed are ready vehicles for a quite frequently skeptical engagement with the world around him. We should feel lucky to have these poems gathered under one roof.

Eirik Steinhoff
Chicago Review

Review quote:  A poet who’d come to Crane’s girdered city to reconcile everything found the modesty to brave a nature poem about New York. It’s not that he filtered out the din to find a landscape in repose; it was the human sounds and voices that taught him how to hear those aspects of the natural in the city — like rain and the keening, essentially human need to be touched … Longing, for virtually every poet in the city after Baudelaire, is stirred by visual recognition. O’Brien’s happens in the ear. O’Brien started to hear a city that no one else had ever heard.

Lee Smith
Bookforum