The Bonfire Party
from the three-time winner of The Forward Prize for Poetry
Published on 8. January 2026
96 pages
978-1-0350-6491-5 (ISBN)
Description
The preoccupations of Sean O'Brien's work have for many of us become newly pressing: the recurrence of history, the shadow of war, the precariousness of a peacetime that can no longer be taken for granted.
The Bonfire Party, Forward Prize winner Sean O'Brien's twelfth poetry collection, takes its title from Eric Ravilious's 1930s painting, where some revellers watch the flames, while others feed them or run towards them, in a scene of 'mythic Englishness'. In these poems, the long view afforded by experience results in a truer representation of our predicament and a regretful understanding of human culpability.
Just as times and places flow together to create a shifting, at times visionary perspective, so too do the presences of those we have lost, 'love and death consorting as they must'. In a central sequence - a departure for O'Brien - he writes into the rich imaginative climate of George Simenon's Maigret novels. These poems, both 'homage and transposition', effect a poetic communion of sorts with the physical world and moral atmospheres encountered by the inscrutable detective and his creator.
The working of the imagination itself has become O'Brien's true subject, where the fact of the world and the imagined order of literature and art begin to merge.
The Bonfire Party, Forward Prize winner Sean O'Brien's twelfth poetry collection, takes its title from Eric Ravilious's 1930s painting, where some revellers watch the flames, while others feed them or run towards them, in a scene of 'mythic Englishness'. In these poems, the long view afforded by experience results in a truer representation of our predicament and a regretful understanding of human culpability.
Just as times and places flow together to create a shifting, at times visionary perspective, so too do the presences of those we have lost, 'love and death consorting as they must'. In a central sequence - a departure for O'Brien - he writes into the rich imaginative climate of George Simenon's Maigret novels. These poems, both 'homage and transposition', effect a poetic communion of sorts with the physical world and moral atmospheres encountered by the inscrutable detective and his creator.
The working of the imagination itself has become O'Brien's true subject, where the fact of the world and the imagined order of literature and art begin to merge.
Reviews / Votes
The supreme poet of urban spaces and the north ... Erudite, attuned to the beyond and the everyday, O'Brien's work repays many re-readings. -- Suzy Feay * The Telegraph * [The Bonfire Party] reinforces O'Brien's authority as a chronicler of our times, 'love and death consorting as they must'. -- Jennifer Lee Tsai * The Guardian * The greatest pleasure, whatever he chooses to write about, is O'Brien's unforced gift, the ease of the writing, the phrases that seem to roll off his pen -- Kate Kellaway on <i>It Says Here</i> * Observer *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Pan Macmillan
Target group
Interest Age: From 18 years
File size
0,67 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-0350-6491-5 (9781035064915)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Person
Sean O'Brien's twelve collections of poetry include The Drowned Book, Europa, Embark and The Bonfire Party. His work has received awards including the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize, the E.M. Forster Award, and the 2020 Beijing Literature and Arts Network Award for Poetry for lifetime achievement. His other work includes fiction, drama, criticism and translation. In 2020 his translation of the Collected Poems of the Kazakh national poet Abai Kunanbayuli was published, and in 2021 he edited Alistair Elliot's This is the Life: Selected Poems. His poems have been widely translated. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne.
