
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 & rhetorical assurance The Beautiful Librarians is a stock-taking of sorts & a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our culture often overlooked by both capital & 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 & silencing guardians of literature & 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 & a very French exercise in waiting A book of terrific variety of theme & form The Beautiful Librarians is another bravura performance from the most garlanded English poet of his generation