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.