The Lucky Last at the Terminal of the Dead
£10.00
The Lucky Last at the Terminal of the Dead is a spectral ghost train ride through the intestinal tract of Strike, Austerity, Covid and Gaza. 26 years into the 21st Century we drown in poverty, decay, dissolution, and complicity in genocide. We kill hope, our elders, our poets and prophets, replacing them with tinpot tyrants, self-serving spivs and murderous maniacs.
The Lucky Last at the Terminal of the Dead does not ask us to mourn but to fight; it does not ask us to forget but to bear witness. Ultimately, it asks us what it is to be human as the graves fill.
The Lucky Last at the Terminal of the Dead by James O’Brien, 50pps., ISBN 9781912710010, £10.
The poems in James O’Brien’s The Lucky Last at the Terminal of the Dead convey a verbal energy that brilliantly buoys the insurgency of his tone and the seriousness of his subjects, from austerity and Covid to Gaza. This is political poetry, but the poetry is never subordinate to the message, rather it is its imaginative engine.
In his Introduction to The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970) Scottish poet Alan Bold wrote: ‘It is necessary for the socialist poet to have more impressive technical equipment than his apolitical contemporaries because his task is that much more important’. James O’Brien is one of a number of poets connected to Culture Matters who demonstrably meets this benchmark.
– from the Foreword by Alan Morrison
The Lucky Last at the Terminal of the Dead by James O’Brien, 50pps., ISBN 9781912710010, £10.
