The Dens by Michael Brown
Blueprint Poetry
SW18
Perhaps it was always summer there,
white heat rising by degrees from the island,
our terraced home.
Remember
the colour of the door, those dog-days —
how we played half-dressed in dirt and earth outside.
Dad made us pick up stones.
For hours we ate the light. Fahrenheit.
Sometimes, half bored, when you weren’t there
(that precarious, passing phase)
I’d scale the high bars of the rusted climbing frame,
escape our densely constructed space,
my outlandish child’s shape reaching through years
to risk air, the burning metal of the last rung.
Michael Brown is a poet and PHD student at Loughborough University. His research is concerned with the relationship between depression and lyric poetry.
In 2024 he won the Overton Poetry Prize. His work has recently been longlisted twice in the National Poetry Competition. Michael’s poetry has been featured widely in magazines including Poetry Salzburg, Magma, Poetry Wales and The Rialto. In 2017 he was awarded a New Writing North Award. He has several previous pamphlets including Undersong (Salt, 2013), Locations for a Soul (Templar, 2016), Right of Way (Maytree, 2023) and Our Fathers (Loughborough University, 2024).
His first collection, Where Grown Men Go, was published by Salt in 2019.
The Dens is a sensitive, expertly crafted exploration of a working class boyhood, and the journey through to manhood. The poet explores his relationship to place, both north and south, and to his parents, particularly his father. There is a delicacy and a tenderness to these poems, amid an atmosphere of Heimweh, a longing for origins, of a time and place which is no longer available except in the landscapes of memory and imagination.
Like a Terence Davies film, small details are used to recreate this hallowed time and place, ‘to invent the half lives we all must live’:
.. we show up in outdoor clothes
a sheriff’s badge, the camouflage
of a dog-eared army hat (Gangland)
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