Each poem in Sean O'Brien's superb new collection opens on a wholly different r
oom, vista or landscape, each drawn with the poet's increasingly refined sense o
f tone, history and rhetorical assurance. The Beautiful Librarians is a stock-ta
king of sorts, and a celebration of those unsung but central figures in our cult
ure, often overlooked by both capital and official account. Here we find infantr
ymen, wrestlers, old lushes in the hotel bar - but none more heroic than the lib
rarians of the title, those silent and silencing guardians of literature and kno
wledge who, the poet reminds us, also had lives of their own to be celebrated.
