School of Distance Education

Water Gardens 
by Sean O' Brien 
Sean O' Brien is a British poet, critic, novelist, 
short fiction writer and a fellow of UK's Royal Society 
of Literature. He has written six collections of poetry: 
The Drowned Book
(2007), which won the Forward and 
T.S. Eliot prizes,
Cousin Coat: Selected Poems 1976-
2001
(2002) and other works which include the book of 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
7 
essays 
The Deregulated Muse
(1998),the verse plays 
The 
Birds
(2002),
Keepers of theFlame
(2003) and a verse 
translation of 
Dante’s Inferno
(2006). He is a central 
figure in the contemporary poetry world – he has won 
major prizes for each of his five poetry collections, 
including the Cholmondeley Award, the Somerset 
Maugham award, the E.M. Forster Award and, twice, the 
Forward Prize for Best Collection. What marks him out 
as a large literary figure is energy; his emphatic critical 
intelligence combined with a willingness to take on a 
wide variety of projects .
“Water gardens” belongs to his poetry collection 
The Drowned Book
. The T.S Eliot prize panel called the 
collection “ fierce, funny and deeply melancholic”. The 
forward panel described the collection as “a sustained 
elegy for lost friends landscapes and decaying culture”. 
The opening poems are all about seas rivers water that 
takes the reader to the dark terrain. Water seems to work 
here as a borderline between the living and the dead. The 
current political and cultural scenario of Britain is 
satirized in the poem. The poet talks about mortality 
vendors and rotten smelling mansions. The city has been 
degraded and degenerated. Water in the lawn looks like a 
half buried mirror which reflects many faces that we 
have seen. On the bookshelf we have poets, but they 
have never been read. His poems often use 
simultaneously particular and imaginative places. Real 
places become vehicles for exploration. O' Brien has 
integrated a wider dimension into everyday experience.
His political imagination emerges as multiple.
The 
Drowned Book
is more a book than it is a poetry 

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School of Distance Education
English Literature in the 21
st
 century
8 
collection. Many of the poems relate to water, and not 
only under water—rivers, boats, ports, lighthouses, water 
gardens, ferries, drains, fish, bayous and meres.