by Sean O'Brien
If Hammersmith can still in some sense be read as history, it is the history of an imagination. In the life of the imagination, matters which seem separable from each other in the waking world, such as historical and political facts, actual places and the forms and locations they assume in reverie, personal impressions and memories, the known and the dreamed, appear to merge, shift and re-combine. There is an experience familiar in dreams, where an initial intention – perhaps the attempt to find or do or rectify something – is endlessly deferred. In Hammersmith, the main speaker, who at times shifts into a related character called Ryan (himself perhaps an escapee from some earlier poems), repeatedly finds himself at a loss to continue whatever search he is pursuing among the streets, bars, dancehalls and demolished sites of Hammersmith. Hammersmith itself is where he is required to be, an inescapable place of return, but trails lead to other parts of London as well, in particular to the East End, where my mother began her teaching career during the Blitz. The speaker can never quite arrive, which makes a kind of sense to me, since although I was born in London I never feel entirely present there.
There are some parallels between Ryan’s situation and that of an indigent, long-dead poet called Mulligan, who passes through the text during some later cantos, and who unhelpfully alludes to his unfinished and possibly lost poem about the Thames. Mulligan has some connections to Joxer Daly in O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock. My parents played Juno and Joxer in an amateur production of this play; in the poem their roles have a prophetic element, and a photo of my father from the time shows him as both handsome and a trouble in store; but the he and she of Hammersmith are to a large degree imagined characters, leading lives of their own suggested by the intersection of places and the occasional known event.
As to the beginnings of Hammersmith, after the death of my mother in 2007 I tried for some time to write about her, but I was stuck until a momentary encounter took place on a bus approaching Hammersmith Bridge from the Barnes side. I offered my seat to a very elderly lady, who told me with stern self-possession that thank you, she preferred to stand. From the window I could see Chiswick Mall, where my mother had often walked as a young woman and entertained the idea of living. The juxtaposition gave me the way into the poem, which is called ‘Elegy’. Combined with remembered scenes set on and near the bridge from Jules Dassin’s great post-war London movie, Night and the City (1950), it also seems to have set in train what eventually started to become Hammersmith.
Hammersmith is partly about London, but it is also about Englishness, or a version of it implanted at a very early age, in this case while listening to the radio with my mother as she did the ironing, particularly when the Boat Race or the Grand National were broadcast. These events – with the place names and the commentaries and the whole assumed life they invoked – were clearly of a special and definitive order of reality. Slightly later on I found out about reification, but the enchantment proved hard to dispel, and recently when one of the oarsmen in the Boat Race caught a crab and nearly went into the Thames, a whole set of associations – river, radio, England, the war, my parents, Hammersmith – came to mind afresh, like an invitation that could not be refused, even though it led into the labyrinth where class, race, political disappointment and madness were also waiting.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Crossings: Poets Respond to the Art of Sean Scully, Enchiridion, New Boots and Pantisocracies, Newcastle Poetry Festival, New Humanist, Poem, PN Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Scottish Review of Books, Spark, Stand, The Irish Times, Times Literary Supplement.
Cantos I and II of Hammersmith were published as a chapbook by Hercules Editions in 2016.
It Says Here
It Says Here is Sean O’Brien’s tenth book of poems. His Collected Poems appeared in 2012. His work has received awards including the T. S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, the Somerset Maugham and the E. M. Forster Awards. His novel Once Again Assembled Here was published in 2016 and his collection of short stories Quartier Perdu in 2018. He is also a translator of works including The Birds (2001), Inferno (2006) and Spanish Golden Age plays by Tirso de Molina and Lope de Vega. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
ALSO BY SEAN O’BRIEN
Poetry
The Indoor Park The Frighteners
HMS Glasshouse Ghost Train Downriver
Cousin Coat: Selected Poems, 1976–2001
Dante’s Inferno: A Verse Translation
The Drowned Book November Collected Poems
The Beautiful Librarians The River Road Europa
Essays
The Deregulated Muse
Journeys to the Interior: Ideas of England in Contemporary Poetry
Anthologies
The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland after 1945 (editor)
Train Songs: Poetry of the Railway (co-editor)
Plays
Aristophanes’ The Birds: A Verse Version
Keepers of the Flame Laughter When We’re Dead
Fiction
The Silence Room (short stories)
Afterlife (novel)
Once Again Assembled Here (novel)
The Railwayman
(graphic novel, with Birtley Aris and Gerry Wardle)
Quartier Perdu (short stories)
First published 2020 by Picador
This electronic edition first published 2020 by Picador
an imprint of Pan Macmillan
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ISBN 978-1-5098-4043-4
Copyright © Sean O’Brien 2020
Cover image: A House Collapsing on Two Firemen, Shoe Lane, London by Leonard Rosoman. © Crown Copyright. IWM.
The right of Sean O’Brien to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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