Talking Shop: Sean O'Brien

O'Brien is the Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University

Poet Sean O'Brien has won the prestigious Forward Prize for Poetry for a third time.

The Cambridge-educated poet, who is also a university professor, playwright, and accomplised broadcaster, pulled off the hat-trick with his collection The Drowned Book, which was described by the judges as "witty and heart-wrenching".

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Q: Were you surprised to win Forward Prize for a third time?

A: I was extremely surprised, astonished really, I didn't think it was on the cards at all, so it was great shock.

It is always a surprise, because the company you are in is always very, very accomplished and there are a lot of good books on the list. Having won it twice, I didn't think there was the remotest possibility of winning it for a third time.

I have read work by the other poets on the shortlist, and some are very established and distinguished - John Burnside and Eavan Boland in particular, who are leading contemporary figures. They are all very interesting, and all of whom could have quite reasonably have won, it seems to me.

Q: Why do you think the judges liked your collection, The Drowned Book?

A: I couldn't say, really. One thing that might recommend it is that, in a sense, it is quite a unified work. Its preoccupations are all interlinked, so that might be appealing, but I couldn't really say for sure.

Q: One of the judges said it was your strongest collection yet. Do you agree?

A: I hope it's true because you want to try and improve book by book if it is at all possible, and nobody would like to think they were over the hill. It is encouraging if it seems that way.

I'd like to say my best is yet to come, mind you I could walk under a bus this morning, so you never know.

Q: What made you start writing poetry?

A good poem reintroduces you to the world at a slightly unexpected angle Sean O'Brien

A: We always had lots of books in the house, but the thing that really prompted me was a great English teacher at my school, a Mr Grayson, and he introduced the poems of TS Eliot and Ted Hughes to the classroom, in 1967 when I was 14.

This was simply the most exciting thing I had ever come across, and I suddenly realised that this is what I wanted to do and get involved with. The language was so exciting and it seemed to lend the world an extra degree of solidity.

Q: Can you still remember your first poem?

A: No - fortunately! They have all long since disappeared and I don't have to worry about them.

Q: What inspires you?

A: Like all poets I read great deal, but landscape is always of interest to me, and history and politics are the things I'm always going back to. I'm also interested in the way the imagination works and how the imagination constructs its versions of the world.

I am also interested in Englishness to a degree, but that's not particularly manifest in this book.

Q: What makes a good poem for you?

The Drowned Book is O'Brien's sixth collection of poems

A: All poems are different, but I suppose a good poem reintroduces you to the world at a slightly unexpected angle. A fairly familiar critical idea is that experience can make us deaf and blind to what we actually live with and the task of poetry is to reawaken our senses, so I think a good poem will probably be involved in that in some way. But all poems are different from each other, and they function is slightly different ways.

You pick up a book and you don't know whether it is going to be a pleasantly dull experience or one where your perception is altered, and it is always a great thrill to find a new poet whose work you can see if going to be significant. That is always exciting.

Q: Who are your favourite poets?

A: I'm a great fan of the Irish poet Derek Mahon and of Peter Porter and David Harsent, and among the older poets Wallace Stevens, and Andrew Marvell from the 17th century.

I read poetry pretty continuously and there are poets whose work I always return to. Another contemporary poet whose work I read a great deal of is the Scottish poet Douglas Dunn, and Jo Shapcott too, because I just like the worlds they are able to create linguistically.

Q: And your favourite poems?

A: There are many! The poem I am particularly enjoying at the moment is by the American poet Louis Simpson. It is called To The Western World, and it is about the discovery of the America and it's a very condensed, imaginistic history of what has happened in American history and thus is world history. It is a wonderful, elegiac political poem about possibility and the way in which we use and misuse it.

Q: Today is National Poetry Day. How relevant do you think poetry is today?

A: It is permanently relevant, but people tend sometimes to confuse relevance with fashionability. I think poetry is always relevant because it as about life - it emerges from life and it illuminates life - but it requires a certain amount of patience and effort on the part of the reader as well as the writer. Contemporary circumstances are possibly not all that helpful in that way, when people's attentions are being snapped and drawn in many directions simultaneously, because with a poem you just need to sit and be with it for several hours.

Q: The theme of National Poetry Day is dreams. What are you dreams for the future of poetry?

A: It is one of my dreams that everyone reads poetry - it's a wild fantasy really!

I would like to see a day when, as somebody once said, people read a poem as naturally as they watch a football match or dig the garden - just take it as a ordinary part of life.

Sean O'Brien was talking to BBC News Entertainment reporter Caroline Briggs.