The Bonfire Party

The preoccupations of Sean O’Brien’s work have for many of us become newly pressing: the recurrence of history, the shadow of war, the precariousness of a peacetime that can no longer be taken for granted.

The Bonfire Party, Forward Prize winner Sean O’Brien’s twelfth poetry collection, takes its title from Eric Ravilious’s 1930s painting, where some revellers watch the flames, while others feed them or run towards them, in a scene of ‘mythic Englishness’. In these poems, the long view affo...