Sean O'Brien
The Genre: A Travesty of Justice

Poets have often been interested in crime and crime fiction. W.H. Auden, James Fenton and Kit Wright, for example, have all touched on them in highly individual ways in their poems. Auden also appears as the detective Nigel Strangeways in the crime novels written by C. Day Lewis under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake. The crime novelist and critic Julian Symons began as a left-wing poet and saw the potential of crime fiction for delivering a critique of society. When I started work on The Genre, as well as my own years of late-night/on a train reading in the field I had these writers in mind as guides to the homicidal labyrinth, and I wanted to see if some of the conventions of various kinds of crime fiction could be reapplied in poetry on a fairly large scale, producing a series of narrative images of provincial England from the not-too-distant past, combining parody and bloodshed. The resulting England was intended be highly specific, recognizable, mad and unfathomable. So far there are five chapters with, I think, more to follow.

 

Sean O'Brien

Sean O'Brien's most recent book of poems, Ghost Train (OUP, 1995) won the Forward Prize and was recently named by The Guardian as the best poetry book of the 1990s. In 1998 Bloodaxe published his controversial book The Deregulated Muse: Essays on Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. In the same year his acclaimed anthology The Firebox: Poetry in Britain and Ireland After 1945 appeared from Picador. His new book of poems is due from Picador in 2000. He lives in Newcastle upon Tyne. For part of the year he teaches writing at Sheffield Hallam University.

 

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