A Pillow-Book: Notes from a Reading Life

Drawn from the notebooks he kept over the course of forty years, A Pillow-Book provides a welcome opportunity to listen in on the conversation poet Michael O’Brien maintained with the world in all its ravishing and rebarbative complexity. That world includes the writers he most valued, the art he practiced so devotedly, the painters and filmmakers that stirred him, the nation that sometimes confounded him, and the city he moved through with such unstinting regard.

Consisting primarily of brief passages gleaned from his reading, further enriched by his own observations and commentary, A Pillow-Book captures all the intelligence, subtlety, and wit so manifest in O’Brien’s poems.

Michael O’Brien’s A Pillow-Book is a kind of blueprint or x-ray of the sensibility of one of recent poetry’s neglected masters. Unpredictable, quirky, chock-a-block with coruscating insights that are completely individual and revelatory. A treasure.                      

                        —August Kleinzahler

Michael O’Brien was a writer of meditative wit, generous spirit, and a powerful receptiveness to the most fleeting juxtapositions and suggestions. His poetry—spare, rigorous, preternaturally alert, and still profoundly underestimated—found large perspectives in the most minute phenomena, music in the accidental encounters of overheard conversations and other floating signifiers, biographies and social histories in intercepted gestures and stances. A Pillow-Book extracts another kind of music from his reading over many years, and from the dazzling commentary it drew from him. It is a privilege to share, in this oblique fashion, Michael’s astute and endlessly curious intellectual companionship. 

                       —Geoffrey O’Brien