Sean O'Brien Biography

British poet, born in London, educated at Cambridge, Birmingham, and Hull Universities. In 1989 he became Fellow of Creative Writing at the University of Dundee. Following the enthusiastic reception of his work when it appeared in Douglas Dunn's edition of A Rumoured City: New Poets from Hull (1982), he has produced several collections including The Indoor Park (1983: Somerset Maugham Award), The Frighteners (1987), Boundary Beach (1989), H.M.S. Glasshouse (1991), and Ghost Train (1995), which have sustained his reputation as an astute stylist of considerable technical virtuosity. The imaginative compass of O'Brien's poetry is expansive, with social, historical, personal, and elegiac elements often coalescing into unsettling fictions whose settings range from the squalidly urban to the exotically remote. In the best of his work, intricate rhythmical textures become inseparable from compelling continuities of imagery. The Deregulated Muse (1995) are critical essays on contemporary poetry. With Simon Armitage and Tony Harrison, he edited Penguin Modern Poets: 5 (1995).