It Says HerePaperback, 1 November 2020

Sean O'Brien's follow-up to his celebrated collection Europa 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 center of the book is the long poem Hammersmith, a shadowy, cinematic dream-vision of England during and since World War II. 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.