The Bonfire Party – Sean O’Brien’s twelfth collection – considers conditions at the limit of things, where the world can seem as mysterious as it is empty. This metaphysical cast of mind has deepened through O’Brien’s later works, and amongst The Bonfire Party’s reflections on love, history and recurrence, the climate emergency is also a peremptory and nightmarish presence. In a central sequence, O’Brien writes into the rich imaginative climate of George Simenon in his Maigret novels. These poems are both ‘homage and transposition’, notes the critic Patrick McGuinness, ‘but also a poetic close reading of the smells and tastes and moral atmospheres of one of most singular pairings in literature – Maigret and his creator, Simenon.’ The working of the imagination itself emerges as O’Brien’s true subject, where the fact of the world and the imagined order of literature and art begin to merge. The Bonfire party finds Sean O’Brien advancing the intellectual inquiries for which he is regarded as one of our wisest living poets.
