He is one of the leading poets of his generation, a wordsmith who is no stranger to winning prizes. Last night Sean O’Brien picked up another award for his mantelpiece – the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize.

O’Brien, 55, who believes that “a good poem reintroduces you to the world at a slightly unexpected angle”, won the £15,000 prize with his collection The Drowned Book, which judges described as “fierce, funny and deeply melancholy”.

The poet, Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University, joins the Nobel poet Seamus Heaney and the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes as a winner of the prize, described by Andrew Motion, the current Poet Laureate, as the honour “most poets want to win”.

Peter Porter, chairman of the judges, said: “Sean O’Brien is undoubtedly a major artist, a consistently good poet who sees us living in the middle of a kind of detritus left over from the 19th century . . . In The Drowned Book it’s almost as though he’s seeing into a kind of pool in which the past is there, held in a sort of suspension that’s still around in the 20th century. What’s exhilarating is the way he puts words together, his sentence structure.”

O’Brien was inspired to write as a boy when a teacher introduced him to the poems of Hughes and Eliot. “I suddenly found language very exciting,” he said. “It seemed to lend the world an extra degree of solidity.”

The Drowned Book also landed him last year’s Forward Prize which he had already won with Ghost Train in 1995 and Downriver in 2001. “Writing poetry is often frustrating, while not writing it can be intolerable. Poetry is a vocation – it possesses you,” he said.

His sixth collection has enthused critics and poets alike. Writing in The Times, Elaine Feinstein observed: “In his reflections on contemporary iniquities, O’Brien uses short lines and strong rhymes to lampoon those, for instance, who deny funding to branch libraries and playing fields because they yield less return ‘than asset-stripping mountebanks/ can rake in flogging dope and tanks’.”

Porter said that the judges had been impressed by the quality of entries. “The general standard is higher than it has been for a long time, although we may not have a single poet as outstanding as Eliot, Auden and Larkin. What is lacking is the high standard of reader. We need a few people who buy books, let alone read them. Publishers are honourably and decently publishing good poets not expecting to make a penny,” he said.

Blue night

Blue night. Enormous Arctic air. Orion’s belt.

A geostationary satellite.

The birds all sheltering or flown.

The world is North, and turns its North Face

Pitilessly everywhere,

As deep as Neptune, local as the moon.

First came the fall and then the metaphor

No other island, then. No gift of grace.

For this alone is ‘seriously there’.

Therefore. Therefore. Do not be weak.

They have no time for pity or belief,

The heavens, in their triumph of technique.

© Sean O’Brien, from The Drowned Book, published by Picador

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