Seán Street exploring the circles that shape a life.
Time is a subject that circles us all, but for Seán Street it has become something of a lifelong companion—persistent, questioning, impossible to ignore. His poem, O, presented for the 52 for 26 Poetry Project, grows from that intimate preoccupation.
Drawing on a striking idea from John Berger’s essay How to Resist a State of Forgetfulness, Street reflects on the notion that our lives are not simple points on a line but centres of expanding circles, surrounded by the testimonies of those who lived before us, and by texts not meant for us yet still available to be witnessed. It is a concept that places each of us within a vast, resonant field of memory.
This is familiar territory for Street, whose work has long explored the relationship between time, sound, and human experience. His latest collection, Creation Radio (Shoestring Press, November 2025), follows Journey into Space and Running Out of Time, a trio of books that chart an increasingly reflective poetic landscape. His prose, too, deepens these themes: from studies on Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Dymock Poets to an influential body of writing on sound poetics. His latest, Wild Track: Sound, Text and the Idea of Birdsong (Bloomsbury, with a paperback in May 2025), sits alongside earlier works such as The Poetry of Radio, The Memory of Sound, and The Sound of a Room.
Street’s half-century in radio production has shaped his sensibilities profoundly. He writes like someone who understands that sound is never simply heard—it is carried, remembered, lived with. O is a distillation of that understanding, a poem that leans into the echoes that follow us, the histories that surround us, and the inevitable awareness of time slipping.
Thoughtful, resonant, and quietly searching, O stands as a reflective highlight within the Liverpool Noise 52 for 26 Poetry Project.
O
i
A straight line between horizons,
a road linking history with the possible,
sewn together by a curve of air, space.
But instead of a point on a graph
suppose you’re there in your own circle
turning, watching yourself walking
where the past and future paths catch a
glimpse to left and right of one another,
beyond hedgerow and wall, across fields
from the other side of a lake, a room,
a circular room, a world, universe,
a clock-face remembering.
ii
Sound of a voice through the electric O
of Short Wave radio, wireless speaking
voice on voice, life after life linked
on a chain, a coiling of threads around
themselves, the spiralling double-helix
of generations, family circles,
an old song, a round, variations on a
half-remembered theme echoing
in dazzling circles of light each morning,
a convex mirror flashing Time back
down overgrown lanes of history
as far as the bend in the road takes us.
iii
Across dawn came birds’ wings over water.
Memory of a curved bay, a child on a shoreline,
below beach scree left by a tide, single stones
making a pattern of shapes without shadows,
salt whispers through rockweed, ebb-symptoms
variously on the borders of perception.
One scream across still-dark sea – a first
voice remembered – a quiver of wings lifting,
flicker-pages thumbed, each a single frame,
soundtrack of a film looped, played on repeat.
A grain of sand, a circle on a solitary stone,
in themselves not a beach, but a beginning.
