O'Brien's poetry has the contours of a rusty iron hull. Tough and solid, pocketed with moments of deep existential yearning and coupled with a prophetic voice that calls into account divisive and unjust social stratification. Rare is there such a marriage of acute intellectual self awareness and social consciousness.

I'm new to O'Brien's poetry. I'm also fairly new to poetry written after, say, 1960. As a result, O'Brien's book came as a bit of a shock: I could barely make sense of a lot of it. As a result, I put quite a lot of work into it, with quite surprising results. Some of the poems, but not many, are still without much meaning for me. Others I like very, very much, while at the same time I am incredibly frustrated by them. As soon as I think I have a grasp of what a poem is about, it takes a strange turn, making me wonder if I have understood it at all. I remain annoyed by a considerable number of references in the poems to things which have no meaning for me. No problem, I will research these references and get an enhanced appreciation of the poems. But, no: diligent searching of the internet rarely throws any light on them. I conclude, therefore, that i am not the only person in the dark where these are concerned, and not the only person failing to grasp the sense of the poems. So why is it that I love the poems so much? I think this is partly due to the fact that I can never quite plumb the depths of them, and this keeps me coming back for more. There is also a a beauty in O'Brien's writing which I cannot pin down enough to describe: I see the beauty, and this leads me to want comprehension. I have read several reviews of this book. Apart from one which was brutally critical, none of them make any reference to the difficulties I have highlighted. Are these reviews less than honest? Or am I alone in the world: a literary simpleton who cannot understand simple English? ( )