Experience in Groups

By Geoffrey G. O'Brien Description Reviews Experience in Groups sings and thinks the forms of belonging that organize our lives, offering poems that move with honesty and formal intelligence between the individual and the collective. In a time of ascendant fascism and creative political resistance, O'Brien's work demands that an elegy, love poem, and a sonnet sequence become occasions where personal tragedies and joys find a pattern and a place within national and global struggle. O’Brien’s greatest achievement is that he never fetishizes himself or panders to his audience, a rarity these days in poetry. Although his poems are resolutely abstract and he seems to find no pleasure in the surface of objects nor has an urge to burden us with autobiographical data, there’s moments in his poetry when he does disclose his ordinary life (doing dishes or laundry or walking his dog and so forth) and the details, while utterly mundane, occur so rarely in his work that they elevate (rathe